


Circadia

by imogenbynight



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angels, Angst, Brainwashing, Canon Divergent, Captivity, Cas being a bamf strategist, DCBB, DCBB 2015, Dean/Cas Big Bang Challenge 2015, Demons, Explicit Sexual Content, Happy Ending, Hunters, Literary References & Allusions, M/M, Men of Letters Bunker, POV Alternating, POV Antagonist (prologue + a couple of short middle chapters), POV Castiel, POV Dean Winchester, POV OC (one short middle chapter), POV Third Person Limited, Pining, Post-Episode: s09e10 Road Trip, References to s08e07 A Little Slice of Kevin, Torture, Violence, mild body horror, mild eye horror, minor background OFC/OFC/OMC, minor background Sam/Jody (implied), spells
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-27
Updated: 2015-11-27
Packaged: 2018-05-03 07:52:55
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 39
Words: 76,328
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5282813
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imogenbynight/pseuds/imogenbynight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>4-01 is a monster undeserving of a name. </p><p>In a facility known only as Circadia, he serves a life sentence in punishment for terrible crimes he cannot remember, and is told to be grateful to have forgotten what those he left behind cannot. </p><p>Meanwhile, convinced that he is nothing but a poisonous presence in the lives of those he loves, Dean is attempting to track down Gadreel when Sam calls with bad news: Castiel has disappeared without a trace.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> There's a song by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds called _Red Right Hand_ that has inspired me to write more stories than I can reasonably count, so it came as no surprise when it started playing in the back of my head a quarter of the way into writing the prologue. I can only hope that I've managed to capture the atmosphere in this fic.
> 
> Many thanks are due to [chargetransfer](http://www.chargetransfer.tumblr.com), who created some [wonderful art](http://http://chargetransfer.livejournal.com/5840.html) (how gorgeous are those chapter separators!?), and to my beta, [a-frayed-edge](http://www.a-frayed-edge.tumblr.com), without whom this fic would be riddled with extraneous apostrophes and passive phrases. I've loved working on this years DCBB with both of you, and I'm so happy to finally be publishing the end result of our efforts.
> 
> As always, thanks to the entire [Meta Saloon](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/MetaSaloon) for being a truly inspiring and wonderful bunch of people. I know I told you there wouldn't be a boat in sight this time, but I may have lied. My bad.
> 
> If you have any questions concerning any of the tags, please feel free to [send me an ask](http://www.thevioletcaptain.tumblr.com/ask) over on tumblr--I'll try to get back to you asap :)

**THEN  
**

**December 4, 2012**

About two miles east of Fairmont Airfield in Nebraska, there’s a cluster of old warehouses that were abandoned at the peak of the recession. For six years they’ve remained as their previous owners left them; forgotten boxes of stationary sitting atop scuff-marked desks, three-quarter empty paper coffee cups slowly growing green on various surfaces, leaves gathering in the corners of the hallways, thanks to the doors that were pried open by teenagers looking for a place to drink whatever cheap booze they’d managed to get their hands on.

The parking lots that separate them have slowly been reclaimed by nature.

In the building furthest from the road, for the first time since the now-defunct business had lawyers visiting in 2007, the sound of expensive heels clicking over concrete echoes through the cavernous central room.

Min isn’t happy to be here. While she’s glad to be off the rack and trusted with an important job, she can’t stand the thought of spending hour after hour in this filthy place with the underworld’s most pretentious doctor dictating her every move. But Viggo hasn't approved of any of the previous suggestions, and she, like their King, is getting impatient.

At her side, Viggo stands dressed in a white coat and a ridiculous bow tie that makes Min wonder what exactly she’s done deserve this. Granted, as a denizen of Hell she is due a certain amount of suffering, but she’s been loyal to the King--or appears to have been, anyway--and in her humble opinion she thinks this is reason enough to avoid having to deal with the more insufferable creatures of the underworld. And yet; Viggo.

Min turns to find him rubbing his hands together like an overgrown housefly.

“This will do nicely,” he announces, and sits down at the dusty desk, waving his hand toward her. “Set it up.”

Min purses her lips, refrains from telling him what he can do with his orders, and complies. With painstaking attention to detail she prepares the room, cleaning it as best she can before she summons a few nameless drones to fetch the bulky equipment. As they carry it in, she inspects and cleans each instrument thoroughly.

The final piece to be set up is the most important, though to the layman it looks like little more than a modified dentist’s chair. Min scrubs at a stain on the vinyl seat that won’t come off.

“It doesn’t have to be spotless,” Viggo tells her from his seat across the room, and she grinds her molars together.

“If you’re to conduct any kind of experiment,” she calls back, scrubbing a little harder. “You'll need sterile conditions.”

Viggo scoffs, muttering something under his breath, and she redoubles her efforts. When she’s finally done, the seat is still marked, and the space is no less miserable than it had been when she started. It is, however, filled with all the tools and restraints Viggo will need to perform the operation.

And the operation is the only thing keeping her here.

Once it’s all prepared, she offers to make the call. Unsurprisingly, Viggo is content to remain seated with his feet up, so she slips out into the dusk and steals a car from a Fairmont parking lot.

It doesn’t take too long to find a hitchhiker standing with his thumb out on the edge of a cornfield on US-6, and picking him up is easy.

His name is Winston. He gurgles when she slits his throat.

Blood fills the bowl halfway within the space of three seconds, and she quickly presses his hand over the cut even as he grasps at the door handle, trying to get out and away.

“Don’t struggle,” she tells him, forcing him to grip his slippery skin. “You’ll bleed out too fast. I’ve still got another call to make.”

He blinks at her, opening his mouth—presumably to beg—and a bubble of bloody spittle bursts on his chin. She wrinkles her nose and turns away from him to make the call, resting the bowl on her knees.

The incantation is short, and with a swirl of her finger the warm blood bubbles thickly.

“ _Inferni clamavi ad te regem sermonos meos_ ,” she intones carefully, feeling her mouth twist in distaste at calling Crowley _king_. It only takes a moment for an answer.

“I’m busy,” he says, his tone blunt and distracted. “Make it fast.”

“We’re ready for the angel.”

There’s a brief pause. Crowley makes a noise she might actually classify as impressed until he says,“I’ll have Guthrie bring him up,” and ends the call without so much as a thank you.

He's had the angel locked away in some dungeon for weeks while they've gathered the tools they need, an untapped resource that she'd expected he'd have been glad to put to use. Evidently, he's preoccupied. For that she can't help but be grateful; it means he's less likely to visit for a while.

Min winds down the window of the car, tossing the blood out onto the asphalt before turning back to the still-twitching hitchhiker in the passenger seat. He’s staring at her sideways with wide eyes, skin already beginning to grow waxy and pale. He struggles when she tries to pry his hands back from his throat. It’s a weak effort.

Blood fills the bowl sluggishly, and when it’s enough she pushes him back against the side of the door. He isn’t struggling now.

It’s a longer incantation, this time. Nearly a full minute passes before the blood boils.

“Do you have news?” Godric asks, his voice distant and muffled as it rises from the bowl, and Min wipes her hands clean before she answers.

“Crowley is sending the angel. Are you sure you don’t want me to just--”

“I’m sure,” Godric says. “We need to learn exactly how to do it, and this is how. Besides, Ikenna and I are still working on things over here. No point taking it with nowhere to put it.”

“How long do I have to keep this up?”

“As long as it takes,” he says. Min grinds her teeth.

“Have you _met_ Viggo?” she asks him. “I may kill him before I learn anything useful.”

“Restrain yourself,” Godric answers, as though she’s ever done anything else. “It will be worth it in the end.”

“I know.”

“You’ve done so well, Min,” he tells her. “I couldn’t have chosen anyone better to rise with me.”

Min rolls her eyes.

“Keep it in your pants, Godric,” she tells him, and ducks her head to look at the distant headlights of an approaching truck. “I have to get back.”

She leaves the car quickly, the hitchhiker limp in his seat, and arrives back at the warehouse just in time to see Guthrie and a demon she doesn’t recognize dragging the gangly frame of an injured angel toward the building. The vessel it occupies must be no older than twenty. Lanky and pale, and dressed in an absurdly conspicuous fast food outlet uniform.

Despite Godric’s orders, she’s tempted to just take it now while it is weak and restrained.

Viggo steps outside to meet them before she has time to entertain the idea.

In some ways, she’s glad for it. Seeing the angel strapped to the chair, watching as Viggo prepares his tools in full view of its frightened eyes, she feels a low thrill not unlike the one she felt when she finally picked up a blade in Hell.

For days, she watches as the angel’s mind is pulled at and twisted, slowly, until all the parts that make it work can be spread out and studied and manipulated.

But after more than a week of just standing by, she grows restless. She lets her eyes flash something of promise in the doctor’s direction and convinces him to teach her how the instruments are used. It's the beginning of January before he lets her touch a single thing.

She turns the screws as instructed, and watches as lights flicker in the angel’s eyes. When the intricate tapestry of its neural pathways are laid out plain for her to see in the great, twisting ether that bursts from the base of its skull and up toward the ceiling, she smiles. The air crackles. The screams are exquisite. The possibilities are endless.

When the doctor finally, _finally_ teaches her how a simple procedure-- _just push the center needle in here, three inches_ \--could render the angel utterly blank yet still brimming with all that untapped power, for the first time in years, she thinks that there might actually be a chance for Godric’s plan to work.

She sneaks outside as soon as she can, heading for the nearest town to call him with the news. When she returns, it’s just in time to see a long, black car pulling away from the warehouse.

Inside, she finds every last one of the guards dead. Viggo’s meatsuit is laying on the dusty floor beside the now-empty chair, blood oozing slowly out from underneath him.

The angel is gone.

She wonders if it will be best to abandon the body she’s been using; stab it through the chest and smoke out before finding a new one and starting a new afterlife under the king’s radar. She could go straight to Godric without having to come up with any cover.

The sound of movement behind her stops the thought in its tracks.

“Where were you?” Crowley asks. She doesn’t flinch. She makes certain of it.

When she turns around, he’s resting one hand on the arm of the chair, watching her with narrowed eyes.

“I went to make a call,” she tells him.

“Hmm.”

“We made a breakthrough,” she goes on quickly. “I wanted to tell you about it.”

“Funny,” Crowley says. “I don’t remember any call.”

“I spoke to Ikenna,” she tells him. “He said you were out.”

After a pause, Crowley nods, apparently satisfied before he looks around the room. He pulls a face.

“Let’s get back to my office,” he says, turning on his heel. “You can tell me all about it there.”

Eyeing the crown where it sits on the trolley table, Min pushes back the desire to ask Crowley if she can stay to clean up and follows him. She has to bide her time.

For weeks, she keeps her head down. Follows Crowley’s orders to the letter. Returns to her usual post in a pharmaceutical company, pulling strings and making life just difficult enough to encourage deals with the devil. All the while, the warehouse sits in silence, the invaluable instruments gathering dust, and she does her level best to put it out of her mind.

The warding on the building is enough to keep most humans away with its projected sense of low-level dread, and with the angelic hostage gone there’s no reason anyone from Heaven would try to find their way inside.

When Godric finally contacts her with the news that everything on his end is ready, it doesn’t take much convincing for the King to give her leave to run an errand to collect them.

“Take Sullivan,” he says when she brings it up, barely looking up from the contract he’s adding another sub-clause to. “She’s been pestering me for a job upstairs.”

Min tries not to let her thoughts on that particular order show.

“Only if I can have one of the guards, too.”

He looks up at that, his pale blue eyes narrow and sharp.

“That’s not how this works, pet. I _tell_ , you _do_.”

“Two of us won’t be enough,” she insists. “We’ll need two on collection, and one to keep look out in case--”

“In case anyone from upstairs is still watching,” he says with a sigh, slumping back a little and squeezing the bridge of his nose as though trying to stave off a headache. “Fine. Take Ikenna.”

She fights back a smile. Ikenna might be Crowley’s second most trusted guard, but like Min, he’s been working with Godric for longer.

“Thank you, sir.”

He waves her away.

“Don’t bother me again,” he says, turning back to the contract. “When it’s all in lock up, just get back to your usual post.” He frowns, glancing back up. “Remind me--where is that, again?”

“PharmaSect, sir."

Something glints in his eyes.

“Keeping things expensive, I trust?”

She nods.

“Ah,” he smiles, then. Sharklike. “I knew there was a reason I liked you.”

Now, as Min climbs from the passenger seat of the van and hops down to the gravel that crunches under the soles of her shoes, she eyes the building with distaste. In the two months that have passed since she was here, she had forgotten how filthy it was.

The first order of business, she thinks, will be to make sure the new location for this equipment is clean. The dungeons of Hell are one thing, but why the king, with all his resources, would choose to do important business in such a dank, revolting place is beyond her understanding.

“Ikenna, you’re with me,” she says, opening the back door and taking the empty bag from the back. “Sully, keep watch out here.”

Sullivan turns to frown at her from the back seat, her long hair swinging around to hang in her eyes.

“Why do I gotta be the lookout?” she asks, pushing it behind her ears, and Min hoists the bag over her shoulder.

“Because life isn’t fair, and you don’t draw attention,” she says simply.

Sullivan sighs.

“Fine,” she says.

“We shouldn’t be long.”

The van door creaks when she closes it. Ikenna is already waiting by the side gate, casting his gaze over the cracked concrete, stained with blood from Crowley’s slaughtered goons.

“How exactly did you get out of here alive?” he asks as she walks past him, and she looks back over her shoulder as they pass under the first of the warding sigils.

“I didn’t,” she says.

Ikenna lifts a brow. Min shrugs.

“I was out.”

Looking back toward the door, Ikenna scratches at his chin.

“What are we going to do about her?”

“We’ll give her a choice,” Min says. “She works with us, or she dies.”

The room is at the back of the warehouse, the heavy door busted and half hanging off its hinges. When they reach it, Min stops and points toward the end of the hallway, where another door has been knocked loose to let daylight spill inside.

“Keep an eye out,” she says, and slips into the room without waiting for a reply.

The air inside reeks of the mildew and black mold that grows in the corners of the windows and creeps along the walls. Overwhelmingly, though, it’s the scent of blood that stands out. Blood and something headier; something like myrrh and fire and the air before a thunderstorm.

The room’s walls are covered in sigils, most invisible to the naked eye, but those that can be seen are painted in blood. The shapes adorn the windows in sharp slashes of scarlet edging into black where their painter spread it on a little thick.

Despite the season, the rain has done little to clean them.

There’s evidence of the weather in a puddle along the window frames, in marks on the wall where water has seeped through the cracks to drip down old brick in muddy streaks. Beyond that, it looks much the same as it did the last time Min was here.

On the wall, a blood-stained apron hangs.

Min inspects it, stepping close and licking a fingertip to wipe a little away before raising it back to her lips. It’s salty and rancid, and something in it makes her tongue burn and tingle as though she’s licked a car battery. Grace.

All the instruments are still in place. The chair at the center of the room, dark vinyl and metal cuffs. The tray table with the needles, the knives, the device she’s been thinking of as the crown for lack of a better name--all shining the silvery bright of heavenly weapons despite the dust. All waiting to be taken.

Dropping the bag onto the floor, Min picks them up one by one, inspecting them with all the care and attention of a museum curator. The needle is cool under her fingers, tacky with old blood.

She cleans it before putting it into the bag.

The crown she saves for last, wrapping it carefully in a soft, dark cloth so as to protect the pins from being bent or scratched by any of the other instruments.

“Ikenna,” she calls out, stepping back out into the hall where Ikenna stands in silhouette against the bright sun outside. “You’ll need to help me move the chair.”

Turning, Ikenna regards her with dark eyes.

“Did you find everything else?”

She inclines her head.

“All here,” she says, lifting the bag she carries and patting it with her other hand. “We need to move. Godric is expecting us.”


	2. Tabula Rasa

** **

**NOW**

**January, 2014**

It’s a strange feeling, to find you exist.

At once the universe shifts from dark to light, and in an instant he’s overwhelmed with searing, jagged red. He feels small and heavy. Weighted down with something hot and cold at once. It digs into him, pulling and pushing and _crawling_ in his skull, thrumming deep in a way that makes his teeth ache.

Trying to move only seems to make it stronger, harsher, louder, sharper, and his throat works helplessly around a pained cry that spurs on another, another, another.

“Min!” a deep voice calls out from somewhere nearby. “Get back here!”

When he tries to turn his face toward it, the sharp, searing _thing_ in his head pinches and he’s hit with a blinding millisecond of agony that makes his lungs constrict in his chest and his eyes burn so hot that he fears they will blister and burst from his skull before he’s even figured out where he is. _Who_ he is.

Something presses firmly on his chest before he can move any further, anchoring him back down. Five individual points of contact, heavy and insistent. Fingers. A hand.

He doesn’t fight it.

“Don’t try to move,” the voice says, and beyond it he hears the click of high-heeled footsteps as someone briskly approaches. The sound echoes loud. Bounces between his ears painfully.

“Ikenna?” Min’s voice is much higher, much thinner than the first. “What-- Why is he awake?”

“I don’t know. Sully probably fucked up the dosage.”

“We should crown her,” Min says. “Maybe then she’d learn to do her job properly.”

Ikenna laughs, and the motion of it runs down the arm and through the hand still pressing against his chest.

Catching his breath, he attempts to speak, but his mouth feels gummy and strange. Dry. His lips are cracked, and when he runs his tongue over them he tastes blood and old spit, dried in the corners. His breath rattles.

“What--” he finally forces out, but moving his jaw to speak makes the spike in his head twinge again, and the pressure on his chest increases.

“Quiet,” Min says.

“Hold still,” Ikenna adds, and then, to Min; “If we sedate him again, we won’t be able to extract until tomorrow.”

“So we’ll remove the crown now,” she says.

“While he’s awake?”

“What, are you worried about hurting him?”

“More that we’ll damage something important. We already lost three this week.”

Min makes a thoughtful noise, and steps close enough that he can almost see her. The spots in his eyes are slowly fading, and he takes in her artfully styled hair in a daze. Looking at her makes his eyes hurt, like seeing double. Her mouth is turned down at the sides when she speaks.

“So long as he holds still, he’ll be fine.”

Her small hands move close, then, carefully cupping his chin and tilting it back until he’s facing the roof. It’s painted white, the lights catching on it in bright patches where the paint is slightly glossier, like it’s just been scrubbed clean.

“Now,” Min tells him, softening her voice. “We need to remove this--”

With one dark-nailed finger she taps on that cold spike he can still feel pressing against the center of his forehead, and he chokes out a desperate sound at the pain that radiates through him.

“--and that pain was nothing compared to what you’ll feel if you move an inch while we do it. Blink twice if you understand.”

Carefully, so as not to risk moving his forehead at all, he blinks twice.

“Good,” she says, and taps on his chin. “Open your mouth. Slowly, now.”

He does, and Ikenna’s brown-skinned hand slides into his vision, holding out something dull red and rubbery and pushing it into his mouth.

“Bite down,” he says.

It’s all the warning he gets before hands are on the sides of his head, holding him still as the spike in his head is slowly pulled free. He feels the bitter cold pull of it, the searing sharp sting that splinters outward to blind him with every millimeter of movement. In the back of his throat he tastes blood, acrid and thick. Someone is screaming, rough and desperate, and their voice fills him, shatters him as he waits for the pain to stop.

For the longest time, it doesn’t.

When he opens his eyes again--unaware they had ever been closed--he’s laying on his stomach. He sees a hand stretched out before him, fingers splayed across the faded blue linen of a narrow bed. He moves, and the hand moves with him.

 _His_ hand, then.

Tanned and masculine with broad palms and long, graceful fingers. Short clipped nails. A bruise on the first three knuckles, mottled yellowish-green at the edges where it has started to fade.

An old bruise.

He flexes his fingers and feels the dull ache of it. Turns his hand and feels the pull of skin where a deep, long cut stretches diagonally from the base of his index finger to the heel of his palm. It’s days old, at least. Scabbed over except for an inch at the bottom where the skin has already knitted back together in a raised, red line.

Slowly, he spreads his fingers flat against the mattress as he attempts to lift his head, but it’s slow. Difficult.

It’s only a moment before cool hands are pushing at his shoulder, helping him turn over. As soon as he’s on his back the hands move to his face, holding his chin as a searing bright light is pointed directly into his eyes. It makes him squint and grimace, twisting in the grip to move away.

“He’s reacting to stimulus,” that same deep voice from before says, and it takes him a moment to remember the name. Ikenna.

He blinks against the light until it lowers, and through his spotty vision he sees a handsome, sharply dressed man with a well-kept beard staring down at him. Though his jaw aches, he forces it to work.

“Where am I?”

“We’ll get to that,” Ikenna tells him, putting the flashlight into his pocket and tapping him on the shoulder. “Sit up.”

The motion makes his head spin, but he does it all the same. A bundle of soft cloth is pushed into his hands the moment he’s upright, and he looks at it in confusion. Pale gray pajamas that stand out starkly against the dirty black suit pants he wears.

“Follow me,” Ikenna says, and moves to the door. Metal and glass set into a dull gray wall. Ikenna gestures with his chin. “Now.”

Pushing to his feet takes effort, but after the first few steps he manages. He feels unsteady and wrong. Dizzy. His head throbs, the point at the center of his forehead more than anywhere else, and the glaring white fluorescent lights feel like they’re digging into him.

The hallway outside is more of the same. Gray walls, bright lights.

The floor is a cold metal grill that digs into his feet, and he looks down at his toes as he walks. His feet are bare and pale and dirty.

“Where are my shoes?”

“You don’t have any,” Ikenna tells him, coming to a stop halfway down the hall outside a door marked _bathroom_. “In here.”

The bathroom is covered in tile. Five wide silver shower heads line the back wall with tiled partitions between them, though none have doors. A row of wooden benches sits opposite, thin white towels hanging above. On the far left side, another door marks the entrance to toilet stalls.

“You have three minutes,” Ikenna tells him once he’s inside, moving back toward the door before adding with an unsettling smile, “It’ll be your only solo shower. Enjoy it.”

The door clunks heavily when it closes, and for a long moment he stands and stares, clutching the clothes to his chest. The floor under his feet is cold and wet.

He deposits the clothes onto one of the benches and carefully undresses before stepping under one of the shower heads and turning a faucet. The water takes a moment to flow, and it’s freezing cold. He flinches back, stumbling and slipping and barely remaining upright in a body that just doesn’t quite feel like his. Like he’s lost some crucial limb that he has no name for.

He doesn’t even have a name for himself, though. That’s likely the greater concern, here.

Gingerly, he reaches through the cold stream and twists the tap until the water is bearable.

As he washes, the soap twisting down the drain in a swirl of dirty, reddish-gray, he glances back across the room toward the long mirror over the wide basin and sees himself for the first time.

At first he’s scared he doesn’t know the face looking back at him, but after a moment he realizes that the mirror is slightly bowed in the middle, warping his face. The dark hair he recognizes. The lightly tanned skin and the wide mouth. The stubble at his jaw.

He can’t quite make out his eyes from here, but their shape is familiar, and that is a relief.

His body seems less familiar. Almost as though he hasn’t seen it often. Now, he inspects it. Studies the narrow hips, the muscular thighs. There’s a tattoo on his hip, impossible to make out in the mirror, and he looks down to trace his fingers over the strange symbols.

He wonders what they say. The language is entirely beyond his comprehension, and yet he knows he can read.

He’s still looking at it when heavy thump comes at the door.

“Water off,” Ikenna calls out. “Move it.”

 

 

Clutching his old clothes tightly against his chest, he steps back into the hallway and finds a tall, athletic-looking woman standing beside Ikenna. She looks at his clothes with distaste and points back into the shower room, where a trash can stands in the corner under a paper towel dispenser and a small white cabinet.

“Those belong in the garbage,” she tells him, and he recognizes her voice immediately as the other from the room where he’d awoken. Min. He stares at her, and when her hand doesn’t lower he turns and walks back inside, pushing his clothes into the trash.

Slowly, he’s led further along the hall, finally coming to a stop outside another room. He follows Min inside, Ikenna trailing behind, and sits in the single chair when she indicates it with a wave, barely looking at him as she takes a small computer tablet and taps against the screen.

“Look forward,” she says.

He does, and a bright flash leaves spots in his eyes.

“Alright,” she says, lowering the tablet and crossing to a small device on the edge of the room, plucking a plastic card out as soon as it stops whirring and bringing it back to clip to his shirt. “4-01, welcome to Circadia.”

She says it with a smile. It makes him uneasy.

“What is 4-01?”

“You are.”

Something in him denies that, and he feels himself squinting at her, his body prickling cold all over.

“That is my name?”

“That is your designation,” she tells him brusquely. “You don’t have a name. You don’t deserve one.”

“Oh.”

“You’re here because you committed terrible crimes against humanity,” she explains to him. “Do you remember?”

With a feeling like he might vomit, 4-01 shakes his head.

“No.”

“That’s good. That’s a mercy, to have forgotten what your victims’ families cannot.”

“My victims?” he asks, throat tight, eyes prickling. Min looks at him with cold eyes.

“You were truly a monster, 4-01.”

“Is this... am I in prison?”

“This is a testing facility,” she tells him. “You’ll pay for your crimes by making the world a better place. Do you want to make up for your sins, 4-01?”

“Yes,” he says, earnest. “Yes, of course. I wish to do penance. Whatever it takes.”

“That’s good, 4-01. You just be honest and follow the rules, and you’ll fit in nicely.”

A knock comes at the door, then, and 4-01 looks up to see a short, red-headed woman in the doorway. She’s dressed as impeccably as Min and Ikenna, but there’s something of a slowness in her manner. A slouch in her shoulders. While Ikenna’s movements are smooth and calculated, and Min’s have a sharpness that almost glitters, quick and wry, this newcomer is casual and indifferent. Like she’s not taking much seriously, despite the nature of people she must have to work with in this place.

A monster, Min had said. 4-01 was a monster.

“3-06 is waking up,” the redhead says, and looks at 4-01 with a raised brow. “Shouldn’t he still be out of it?”

“Yes,” Min replies, something low and dangerous in her tone. “I’ll speak to you when we’re finished with extraction. Thank you, Sullivan.”

Sullivan nods, visibly uncomfortable, and scurries back into the hall. Min turns to Ikenna.

“See to 3-06.”

Without another word, Ikenna leaves the room, and Min takes up her computer tablet again.

“I need you to respond honestly to my questions,” she tells him. “If anything is untrue, I will find out, and the consequences will not be pleasant for you. Do you understand?”

He nods, and she taps on the screen.

“What is your name?”

“I don’t know.”

She looks at him sternly, and he searches what little memory he has until he stumbles over her words from a few minutes ago.

“I don’t deserve a name,” he says quickly. “My designation is 4-01.”

Satisfied, she taps on the screen.

“Do you remember anything of what you did before?”

“My crimes?” he asks, and she looks at him sternly.

“Anything at all.”

“No.”

“Did you dream before you woke today?”

He frowns, thinking back, and eventually shakes his head.

“No, I don’t think so. Not that I can remember.”

“Do you hear phantom voices?”

“Phantom voices?” he asks, and shakes his head. “Was that something I did before?”

She doesn’t respond, and he clears his throat.

“No,” he says. “I don’t hear any voices. But...”

Glancing sharply up at him, Min purses her lips, and 4-01 gulps nervously.

“Perhaps it’s nothing, but... when I look at you directly my head aches. I feel like I can’t focus. Is that normal?”

“It is,” she tells him. “It’s a side effect of your treatment.”

With a few more taps on the screen, Min puts down the tablet and crosses the room to wash her hands. She’s fastidious and thorough, scrubbing for what feels like forever before she pulls on a pair of thin blue gloves. When she walks back, she wheels a metal cart over to him. On it, a deconstructed needle lays. The chamber is clear glass and enormous, and the needle itself is long and thick--more like a thin nail than something being used for a medical procedure. It glints in the light.

4-01 swallows nervously.

“What is that for?”

“There’s evil inside you, 4-01,” Min tells him, picking up the needle and attaching the chamber with practiced speed. “We have found a way to remove it.”

He blinks in surprise.

“You’re curing me?”

Min smirks briefly, tightening the chamber. The expression leaves 4-01 cold all over.

“In a way,” she says. “Though that is just a side effect. By studying the source of your cruelty, we hope to find a way eradicate it from all humanity. You will remain here for the duration of your sentence, and we will extract from you daily.”

“How long is my sentence?”

“Life.”

There’s nothing he can do but nod. 4-01 tightens his grip on the chair’s armrests as Min checks the needle one last time.

“You’ll need to hold very still,” she tells him, pushing at his shoulder until he’s laying back against the chair.

“Will it hurt?” he can’t help but ask. She only smiles.

 

 

Extraction leaves 4-01 feeling hollowed out and drained, and he doesn’t even ask what the medication is when he’s handed a few pills. He just takes them, swallows them dry and tries to keep them down as he pushes to his feet.

He’s lead to an elevator by Sullivan, and while they wait for the doors to open he reads the sign overhead over and over again without really registering their meaning.

NO UNAUTHORIZED USE, it says. PRISONERS MUST USE STAIRS. Sullivan catches him staring at it.

“First day perks,” she tells him. “Every other day, you take the stairs. Got it?”

He nods, feeling his brain pound with the motion of looking toward the stairwell where she’s pointing. He doesn’t turn back until he hears the doors slide open.

“Where are we?” he asks her once they’re inside, and she looks over at him as she presses the button for level two.

“Circadia,” she says.

“It smells like rain here,” he says, the words emerging from his mouth without his permission, floating lazily into the quiet of the elevator.

Sullivan just rolls her eyes.

“That’s just from all the rocks,” she says, and the doors open. She steps outside swiftly, sticking her arm through the door to make it stay open. “Hurry up, I got crap to do.”

“All the rocks,” he repeats, wondering what was in those pills, and follows her. “Alright.”

It’s not quite as bright on level two, but the floor is made up of the same metal grill that clangs noisily with every step.

A blue sign hangs from the ceiling when they reach the end of the hallway, the only color in a sea of gray, pointing left toward the mess hall and back the way they’d come for the elevator and gymnasium. To the right, the sign announces, are the cells.

4-01 feels his stomach toss restlessly.

The cells, he sees, are all glass-fronted rooms with gray walls and concrete floors. He counts ten on each side of the hallway, each furnished with two narrow cots against the side walls and a low shelf between them.

On the right, the rooms are dark and empty, their doors standing open. On the left, they are lit up bright. The first room is occupied by an old woman with pale, papery skin, and a girl who looks eighteen at the oldest, sitting on the very edge of her cot and bouncing a restless knee.

The next holds a tall man with golden-brown complexion, his short dark hair curling at the nape of his neck as he sits in quiet contemplation.

Sullivan comes to a halt outside this room and presses her thumb to a button on the door. As 4-01 watches, a section of glass shifts a few inches back before sliding sideways into the wall.

The man in the cell looks up. His eyes drift over 4-01 slowly before settling on Sullivan, who pushes him roughly forward.

“1-03, meet your new cellmate,” she says. “Play nicely.”


	3. The Hits Keep Coming

The rain hasn’t stopped for days, and not for the first time, Dean wonders if there’s some irritating Chuck’s-books-related reason why his life is always rife with symbolism.

Montpelier is the first town he’s actually stopped in for more than gas since he left Sam and Cas on that bridge in New York a little under a week ago, and though he’s glad to be out of the car he has no idea what he’s doing.

Somewhere out there, Gadreel is alive and kicking, and every breath that fills Dean’s lungs reminds him that Kevin’s last came as he saw the hand of someone he trusted descending on him in cold blood. Sam has that memory, too. Sam can remember laying an open palm on the forehead of a friend, someone he’d seen almost as a brother, and burning the life from him.

If Dean could feel a damn thing right now, it would be revulsion. But it’s as though he’s been hollowed out. Like all his insides have putrefied and turned to dust.

He can barely form a coherent thought beyond his own self-loathing, and coming up with a viable plan to track down Gadreel feels just shy of impossible. What he needs, he thinks, is a drink.

The motel he’s currently checked into is the kind that calls a single box of stale Corn Flakes and a pitcher of orange juice in the lobby a Continental Breakfast, so the mini fridge in his room is unsurprisingly lacking in the supply of an honor bar. Stepping out into the persistent downpour, Dean slips his room key into his jacket pocket and turns up his collar against the icy wind.

Two blocks away, on a side-street corner beside a Chinese take-out place, there’s a bar--aptly named _Bar_ , from what Dean can tell. The sign is in all caps, flashing red.

The door is locked when he tries to open it, though he can see a few people inside, and it’s only when he yanks it hard enough to rattle that a pretty woman at a hi-top table by the window taps on the glass and points to a sign: enter through alley.

The side-street stinks of stale beer, and when he reaches the back, cutting through a crowded, narrow parking lot, he catches the sound of one of his least favorite bands filtering out through the door. He starts to wonder if it’s even worth going inside.

A low rumble of thunder followed by an even heavier onslaught of rain decides for him, and he pushes inside, scrubbing a hand through his wet hair and flicking water onto the ground before making his way past the empty dance floor toward an open space near the beer taps.

The bar top, when he leans on it, is sticky with the poorly mopped up remnants of some long-gone patron’s screwdriver. Dean pulls his hand back immediately to wipe it on his jeans.

It’s not the worst bar he’s ever been to, not by a long shot. Still, between the cloying miasma of cocktails and old sweat, and the frankly painful soundtrack spilling from the overhead speakers (he can honestly understand Balthazar’s motivation to stop _Titanic_ from existing if he hated Celine Dion half as much as Dean hates Jefferson fucking Starship) it’s definitely not somewhere he’d want to visit a second time.

The lone bartender is busy mixing something green and fruity for an already tipsy woman who’ll probably get cut off after this one, so, with nothing better to do while he waits, Dean turns to survey the room.

Given that it’s a Tuesday, it’s not too crowded, and from what he can tell the majority of the people here are all in the same group seated by the window. The woman who’d pointed out the sign to him makes a not-remotely-subtle attempt to catch his eye, and he gives her a tight smile before turning back toward the bar.

Ordinarily he’d at least make an attempt at conversation. Tonight he just doesn’t have the energy.

“What are you after?” the bartender asks, finally coming to a stop in front of him, and Dean’s about to answer when he adds, “Besides a towel.”

“What?”

The bartender gestures vaguely toward his head, regarding Dean with a loose smile as he flips his dishtowel over one tattooed shoulder.

“Looks like you swam here.”

“Oh,” Dean lets out a huff of laughter and relaxes a little against the barstool, scrubbing at his damp hair again. “And here I thought I looked pretty good.”

“Didn’t say you didn’t,” the bartender says with a wink, and Dean feels his face flush deeply at the realization that he’s just inadvertently flirted with the guy. He clears his throat.

“Uh, just... I’ll have a Texan Star, thanks.”

“You got it.”

He busies himself with reading and re-reading the three-item snack menu while he waits. _Mozzarella sticks, shoestring fries, nachos. Mozzarella sticks, shoestring fries, nachos. Mozzarella_ \--

“Anything else?” the bartender asks, sliding an opened bottle in front of him, and Dean falters in his head.

“Nachos,” he says, even though he means to say _nothing_ , and hands over a handful of crumpled bills. He picks up his beer, pointing toward the rear corner of the bar, as far from the rest of the patrons as possible. “I’ll just be--”

“Won’t be long,” the bartender tells him with another wide smile, and Dean tosses back a mouthful of his drink before he heads across the floor. No sooner than he’s slid into the relative comfort of a booth in the quiet back corner, his cell starts ringing in his pocket. It’s tempting to ignore it, but he still digs it out to look at the screen. Sam.

With a weight in his gut, he lets his thumb hover over the ignore button for a moment before muttering dammit and reluctantly accepting the call.

“Hasn’t even been a week, Sam,” he says in lieu of hello. “I was serious about doing this on my own.”

“I know you were. That’s not why I’m calling.”

Something is off about his voice, and Dean sits up straighter.

“What’s going on?”

“Have you heard from Cas?”

Dean puts his beer down on the table, switching his phone to the other ear.

“He left me a message after you guys got back to the bunker,” he says, the memory making him a guilty that he didn’t call him back, “but that’s all. Why? Is he okay?”

“I… I don’t know,” Sam admits. “He went to pick up some supplies at like nine yesterday morning, and he never came back.”

The words _he’s been missing since yesterday and you’re only calling me **now**?_ are right there on the tip of Dean’s tongue, but he forces them back. He told them not to call. He told them he wouldn’t answer. He clears his throat.

“Have you tried praying?” he asks.

“Yeah,” Sam says with a worried sigh. “I thought I’d get you to try as well, though. Half the time he doesn’t answer when I do it.”

“That’s not true,” Dean says, and Sam just snorts. “How about his phone? Did you get a trace?”

“Yeah, I traced it as far as Omaha, but then it just dropped off the grid. I’ve checked in to a motel here.”

“Text me the address,” Dean says, getting to his feet. “I’ll be there by morning.”

 

 

 

He’s halfway through the back parking lot when he hears the sharp tap of dress shoes on asphalt, and the skin on the back of his neck prickles moments before he’s spoken to.

“Leaving so soon?”

As always, Crowley’s voice comes with a built-in smirk. Dean’s fingers curl around the blade in his pocket before he’s even fully turned around.

“You’ve got a hell of a death wish showing your face around me right now,” he says.

Crowley just lifts his brow and sticks his hands in his pockets, rocking back on his heels as he glances back toward the dingy bar.

“I think you broke that poor bartender’s hear--”

He doesn’t get any further before Dean’s forearm thumps against his chest, pushing him hard back against a dented Honda.

“Touchy subject, I see,” Crowley says.

“Where is he?”

“Probably still gazing wistfully towards the door, daydreaming about bowlegs and crying into a bowl of nachos,” Crowley smirks, and grimaces when Dean presses the blade of his knife to the base of his jaw, just shy of breaking skin. “You asked!”

“Cut the crap, Crowley. Tell me why you took him so I can--”

“ _Took_ _him_?” Crowley says, eyes narrowing as he tries in vain to lean away from the blade.

“Him who? Don’t tell me there’s been a Moosenapping.”

His confusion seems legitimate, but Dean’s dealt with the slimy fucker enough times to doubt it.

“Don’t play dumb.”

“ _Not_ Moose?” Crowley says, frowning before something seems to click in his head. “The angel, then?”

Dean makes no reply, but he feels the telltale twitch in his jaw give him away. Crowley’s expression brightens, like it’s the best news he’s had all day. Hell, it probably is. Dean grits his teeth.

“I’d love to take credit, Squirrel, but someone’s beat me to the punch this time.”

“So you didn’t send your goons after him?”

Backing off slightly, he lets Crowley shake himself loose and dust his suit jacket off.

“I don’t have goons,” he says. “I have loyal servants.”

“Well _someone_ grabbed Cas and dumped his car,” Dean says. “So how about you get to finding out where they stashed him before I get bored and poke you full of holes?”

“You’re just itching to skip the foreplay tonight, huh?” Crowley says, and Dean flexes his grip on the blade, threatening. Crowley sighs, rolling his eyes. “No fun at all.”

“If you didn’t have anything to do with it, why are you even here?”

“I had a business proposition for you,” Crowley says. “Thought you might be interested in a brief ceasefire so we could take down Abaddon together, but obviously I picked a bad time.”

Dean scoffs.

“Crowley, I’d sooner set myself on fire than work with you.”

“Harsh,” Crowley says. “And not exactly inspiring me to help find out who took Feathers.”

“Do what you want,” Dean says, stepping back and turning, heading toward the street. “I don’t have time for your bullshit right now.”

He doesn’t hear Crowley leave, but no sarcastic remarks follow him out onto the street, so he figures he’s gone back to Hell. Dean just hopes he stays there.

The brake lights of the car ahead reflect off the blacktop, blinding red, and Dean swerves around them, counting the hours until he’ll arrive in Omaha.

It’s about a nine hour drive, but he figures that if he pushes it he can make it in eight. His knuckles are white where he’s gripping the wheel, and he forces his hands to relax, rolling his wrists and stretching his fingers out.

His cell rings around halfway, as he’s passing through Davenport, Iowa a little after two in the morning, and when he looks at the screen the display is lit up with an obnoxious emoji devil and a three digit phone number that shouldn’t technically exist.

“You’d better have good news for me,” Dean says.

“Always so polite,” Crowley replies. “No wonder you’ve got so many friends.”

Refusing to take the bait, Dean inhales slowly and attempts to relax his grip on the wheel.

“Did you find him?”

“No,” Crowley says. “He’s not in Hell, and nobody’s claiming responsibility.”

“Really?”

“Looks like you’re on your own. Let me know when you’re ready to deal with the ginger.”

With that, he promptly ends the call, and Dean grits his teeth, pushing the pedal harder against the floor. His vision starts to blur after four hours. He keeps on driving.


	4. The Continental

He finds Sam in a diner opposite the Daisy Inn, stirring half-and-half into shitty filter coffee and reading something on his laptop. Noisily, Dean slumps down into the opposite seat and grabs a corner of toast from his brother’s plate in lieu of announcing his arrival.

His stomach groans at the much needed food.

“Dude,” Sam says, staring at him across the table. “I wasn’t expecting you until seven.”

“Not everyone drives like you, grandma,” Dean tells him, ignoring the pinched expression on Sam’s face to catch the attention of a passing waitress. “Can I get a coffee?”

When he looks back at Sam, he’s still staring.

“Did you drive all night?”

“Like that would be something new,” Dean points out. He gestures toward the laptop. “You got anything?”

“Yeah,” Sam says. “His car.”

“You found it?”

Nodding, Sam digs his cell from his pocket and swipes the screen to pull up some photos. He hands it over. Dean flicks through the pictures.

“It’s under an old railway bridge on the edge of town,” Sam tells him. “I found it last night, but it the rain was too bad to see what I was looking at. But, uh...”

“What?”

“It stank,” Sam says. “Seriously reeked of sulfur.”

“Of course it did,” Dean says with a sigh, and pauses on a picture of tire tracks in mud. He turns it toward his brother. “These were there?”

“Yeah, they’re probably gone by now though. I already sent those to Charlie last night. She said she could hack into that police forensics system that tracks, uh… tracks.”

“Looks like a van,” Dean guesses.

“How do you figure?”

“They’re pretty deep tracks,” Dean points out. “So it was a heavy vehicle. But they’re not big enough for a truck. Also, y’know... if you’re kidnapping someone, you’re probably driving a van.”

The waitress returns before Sam can answer that, delivering Dean’s coffee with a tired smile. Dean picks it up and inhales deeply.

“Just let me get some caffeine in my system,” he tells Sam, “and then we can go down there. I want to check out the car.”

The bridge carries railway tracks over the Missouri River, and by the time they get there the water is getting dangerously close to breaching the bank. The Continental is parked at an awkward angle, like whoever left it there got out in a hurry, and Dean can tell that if the rain doesn’t slow in the next few minutes they’re not going to be able to get it back out.

“Crap,” Dean says, bringing the Impala to a stop at the the top of the hill and putting her into park. “I’m gonna run down and move her out of there.”

“Here--” Sam says, tossing him a set of keys. Dean looks at them with a raised brow.

“Keys were left behind?” he asks, and Sam shakes his head.

“Grabbed the spares from the garage before I left the bunker,” Sam says. “When he wasn’t answering the phone, I figured…”

“Right.”

Climbing out, Dean scrambles down the muddy slope as the rain grows heavier. As suspected, the tire tracks Sam photographed last night are all but gone.

“Meet you at the motel?” Dean calls out through the rain, and Sam nods, making his way around to the driver’s side.

The stench of sulphur is thick when he yanks open the Continental, the smell hitting him like a physical force, and he fights back the impulse to gag. Definitely more than one demon, he thinks, sliding into the seat.

Within seconds he’s already established that whoever was driving was a hell of a lot shorter than Cas. They’ve moved the seat so far forward that his knees are squishing against the steering column, and the mirrors are a mess. Making a mental note of how far forward it was, he adjusts it back so he can actually drive and turns the ignition.

The engine comes to life without protest, but he has to do an embarrassing seven-point-turn to get her facing back up the hill. Say what you will about the Impala’s size--at least her steering works.

Thankfully, the rain has eased enough by the time he gets up to the road that he can actually see the oncoming traffic, and by the time he reaches the motel it’s all but stopped; just a fine, misty drizzle that he barely needs the wipers for.

Sam is leaning against the Impala when he pulls into the lot. He pushes away when Dean parks beside him.

“So,” Dean says as he climbs out of the car. “I’ve got a few things.”

“Yeah?”

“Going by the smell in there, I’d say we’re looking for at least two, probably three demons,” he says, angling a thumb back at the open car door. “Which isn’t exactly a shocker, because it’d take at least that to take Cas down.”

“Three,” Sam agrees. “I counted three sets of footprints, and two were pressed down a lot more.”

“So you think they carried him?” Dean asks, and Sam nods, grim.

Dean pushes past his panic to go on.

“Alright. The driver’s seat was all out of whack, so whoever was driving was short. Five-six, at a stretch,” he says, and leans back in to pluck a long, curly red hair from the seat-back.

“And most likely a woman. Or, y’know. Carrot Top.”

Taking the hair from him, Sam widens his eyes.

“Abaddon?” he asks, worried, and Dean pulls a face.

“Dude, what did I just say?” he says, and Sam stares at him for a few seconds before he blinks and shakes his head.

“Right, _short_ ,” he repeats. “Not Abaddon, then. That’s good, at least.”

“Silver lining’s getting crappier these days,” Dean says wryly. “But it’s better than nothing I guess.”

He heads over to the Impala to grab one of the plastic evidence baggies they use when they’re impersonating Feds. He holds it open for Sam, who sticks the hair inside, before zipping it closed and tossing it back into the glove compartment.

“Did you check in the trunk?” Dean asks, turning back toward the other car, and Sam nods as he makes his way over.

“They didn’t touch any of the weapons or ID’s you stashed in there,” he says as Dean pulls it open. “I moved them all into the back of my, uh--”

He gestures across the lot toward a rusted old clunker of a Volvo.

“ _That’s_ what you’re driving?” Dean asks. “It’s orange. And I’m not even talking about the rusty parts.”

“I was in a hurry,” Sam says, pulling a face. “Didn’t exactly have time to shop around.”

“Even so, Sammy,” Dean says, slamming the trunk of the Continental. “Have some pride.”


	5. Anima Quaero

Six days later, surrounded by books in the bunker’s library, Dean drops another useless volume into the pile to his right. Though Charlie’s database search came up with a couple of possibilities for the vehicle that could have left the tracks near the Continental, none were conclusive beyond Dean’s original guess of _van_ , and their search of CCTV footage for the woman who’d driven it to Omaha proved utterly fruitless.

So now, a week after Castiel went missing, he and Sam are camped out in the bunker looking for ways to track an angel that don’t rely on summoning that angel’s grace.

So far, there’s nothing.

With a heavy sigh, Dean opens his eighth book of the day--ENOCHIAN MAGICK: THE DEFINITIVE GUIDE--and drags a finger down the title page.

“Great,” he grunts out, startling Sam into looking up at him from his own presumably useless book. “Another twelve love spells and nothing about actually finding the angel you want. Who the hell writes this crap?”

Slamming the book shut in frustration, he grabs his coffee mug and takes a hearty swig. It’s stone cold. He swallows with a grimace, standing, and leans across the table to take Sam’s mug with him to the kitchen.

“You want another one?”

“Yeah,” Sam says, distracted. “Thanks.”

As he makes his way toward the door, he catches sight of Sam reaching out for a book he’d already set aside, and he pauses to look back.

“You find something?”

“Just had an idea,” he says, flipping through the book. “Maybe... maybe we could track his vessel, instead of him.”

“Track Jimmy?” Dean says, and Sam shrugs.

“I don’t know,” he says, shaking his head and spreading the book open on a page Dean can’t read at this distance. “What you said about love spells--it made me think. There’s a spell in one of these about finding soul mates, which--” he holds up a hand to stop Dean from interrupting, “I know doesn’t help. I wrote it off before because for one thing, Cas has grace, not a soul. But if we can figure out a way to find a _specific_ soul--”

“Then maybe we can find Jimmy,” Dean nods slowly, frowning. “That’s assuming he’s still in there.”

“Did Cas ever say anything to you about it?”

“No,” Dean says, shaking his head. “It, uh... I’ve wondered about it, but I could never figure out how to ask.”

In truth, Dean has wondered about it a lot. More than a lot. Or perhaps wondered isn’t the right word--he’s worried. Agonized. The knowledge that at some point over the past few years his feelings for Cas had shifted from brothers-in-arms to painfully-unrequited love was difficult enough to deal with; having to think about the very real possibility that the body he fantasized about kissing all over was still occupied by two is, more often than not, too much to bear. He clears his throat.

“Well, if you figure out how to do it before I get back with coffee, you win.”

“What do I win?”

“Coffee.”

“Aren’t you getting me coffee anyway?” Sam asks with a furrowed brow.

“Don’t ask me, Sam,” Dean says, heading for the kitchen. “I don’t make the rules.”

Sam does not find the right spell in time to win the dubious prize of already-promised coffee, but he does find one six days later, hidden in the back of a massive book hand-written by some studious Man of Letters in the late 1930’s who thought magic and police work were a perfect match.

Dean is in a foul mood, a storm cloud hovering around him as he trudges back down to the basement for what feels like the hundredth time to carry up another box of probable dead ends, when he finds Sam sitting on the floor in front of an overstuffed book shelf, reading intently.

“Couldn’t wait to read upstairs?” Dean asks, and Sam looks up at him with bright eyes.

“I found it,” he says, grinning.

Dean doesn’t ask before he grabs the book from his brother’s hands, skimming over the needed ingredients--rare, but definitely doable--and the method of casting--best on a waxing gibbous moon, so a few days from now. The bubble of hope that swells in his chest is hard to ignore. He grins down at Sam.

“I think I owe you coffee,” he says, and holds out a hand to pull Sam to his feet.

In the clearing behind the bunker, Dean lays out the items the spell requires in a neat row on an old picnic blanket he found in the bunker’s kitchen cupboard. Something about the long white feather is ridiculous to him, and he tries not to think about it as he sets everything up.

Behind him, Sam is fidgeting, pulling uncomfortably at the long cotton robe he’s had to wear.

“God, this thing is uncomfortable,” he complains, wriggling in a way Dean hasn’t seen since that witch gave him the clap. “ _How_ is it riding up? It doesn’t even have a crotch.”

“Suck it up, Sammy,” Dean says, checking the time. “We’ve got four minutes until prime casting time. You remember all your lines?”

Dean’s almost expecting Sam to roll his eyes, but instead he makes his way across the clearing, stopping by the tree stump on which Dean has placed the silver bowl.

“I put the first three things in the bowl,” he says, pointing them out on the blanket. “Say the blessing. Light them, and pick up the feather. Walk clockwise around the bowl, then counter, then put the last three things in the bowl. Extinguish the flame with the disc of white ceramic and hold it over the smoke while running the feather over it, repeating the blessing three times, and the answer will appear. Right?”

Dean nods.

“Right.”

Sam wriggles around again, tugging at the fabric where it’s bunching around his thighs.

“Remind me again why I’m the one in the robe?” he asks, and Dean rearranges the ingredients again on the blanket.

“You’re better with the pronunciation,” he says.

“Uhuh.”

“Too late to argue now,” Dean tells him with another glance at his watch. “It’s time.”

Pushing out a steadying breath, Sam holds out his hand for the first thing--the obscenely expensive dried bud of some obscure flower that they had to go to three different suppliers to find--and Dean hands it over.

Next is star anise--much easier to locate--and third is a handful of crushed fulgurite.

“ _Scriberem ad portandum loca anima quaero_ ,” Sam intones, and strikes a match. The anise catches quickly, as does the flower bud, and slowly Sam circles the bowl before turning and walking in the opposite direction.

Dean is ready with the next items. Powdered mandrake sends up a burst of pungent smoke, and the _anima lapis,_ which turned out to be a kind of blessed resin Dean had driven seventeen hours to find, is just as offensive to smell.

Last, a scrap of paper with the name _James Novak_ printed in the blood of the spellcaster.

As soon as the paper has burned away, Sam takes the white ceramic disc and rests it over the bowl to extinguish the flame, dragging the feather slowly back and forth over the top.

He repeats the phrase, moving the feather in steady, rhythmic motion, and Dean watches as the tips begin to blacken, despite having no contact with the fire.

“ _Scriberem ad portandum loca anima quaero_ ,” Sam says again. The feather begins to curl inward, smoke curling from the tips. Sam keeps moving it.

With his final repetition, the feather bursts into flame, ash flaking away and floating up into the night. Sam blows a few loose specks from his hands before glancing over at Dean. “Ready?”

Without waiting for a reply, he flips the ceramic disc over.

There, written in smoke, is a word that makes Dean cold all over.

_Heaven_.


	6. Dawn

At seven o’clock the lights come on.

Most mornings, 4-01 wakes before they do and lays in the still, quiet dark, counting down the minutes until they’ll flare up from nothing like a harsh synthetic dawn.

Intellectually speaking, 4-01 knows what dawn is, but he doesn’t remember ever seeing it.

He knows that there is more beyond these walls, beyond his cell and the crowning room and the washrooms. Beyond the mess hall and the gymnasium.

Outside, there is sky which varies in color from the white of his sheets to the bright blue of his own eyes to the pitch black of the minutes before the lights come on. He doesn’t remember seeing it, but he knows he did. There are no windows here. He thinks, somehow, that they must be underground.

Outside, there are trees which form naturally, shooting up from the ground, and they are used to make all sorts of things--the books he is allowed to read on occasion, the shelves which are bolted to the wall between his bed and 1-03’s.

He knows that the trees have leaves which are the color of the beans he’s given to eat, but that once a year many of them become as vibrant and loud as Sullivan’s hair or the blood that Ikenna draws from him each afternoon.

In the world outside, color shifts. Things change. Here, things remain the same. Colors are muted and static. The schedule never changes. It’s predictable.

The lights come on at seven, and the prisoners file into the bathroom to bathe in staggered groups before breakfast. Extraction and the subsequent medication is spread out over the day--some heading in immediately after eating, and others waiting until the late afternoon--but all are finished by six o’clock. The time in between is for exercise, which Min assures them is necessary to ensure the testing is effective, preparing meals, and keeping the facility clean.

They each have a single extraction-free day per week, necessary to ensure their bodies are not overloaded, and on that day they are expected to do little more than sleep or read.

4-01’s free day is Saturday, and he looks forward to it despite being sure he does not deserve it.

It’s not just the pain that bothers him, but the fact that he can never get a straight answer from the wardens about what it is that is being extracted. Just that it is evil--or something that made him evil--though what that could possibly be is beyond him.

Also, there’s something familiar about the room it takes place in. Something that stirs an echo in him of a time before this place that he’s afraid to remember. He wonders if that’s a part of his punishment.

He doesn’t actually remember anything of the time before he began serving his sentence, but he understands the feeling of guilt that Min assures him he should feel when he thinks about it, and he knows that whatever he did it must have been truly awful to have him sent here.

He does have sense memories, though. When he thinks about what he must have done to be sent here, he remembers a feeling of dark twisted power rising in his chest and overtaking him. He remembers the feeling of his fists driving into flesh and muscle, shattering a nose, a cheekbone, a jaw. He remembers blood on his hands, and the feeling of a wrist snapping in his grip, the sound of some faceless, voiceless person begging him to stop, and bites down on the inside of his cheek at the thought that those were all things he did.

He belongs here, he thinks. He should be doomed to extraction forever.

He wonders, more and more often, who his parents are. If he had brothers or sisters or friends who loved him. If they were sorry to see him locked away like this, or glad that he was out of sight, out of mind.

On his left ring finger, there’s a faded tan line that he knows means he wore a ring for some time. He wonders if that might be the source of the strange yearning he sometimes feels sweep over him in the night. Some phantom ache for the arms of an unknown lover, lost before he was sent here. It’s a familiar feeling, that ache, but sometimes it seems to come from without. Like it’s reaching for him.

As strange as the feeling is, the tattoo on his hip is the greatest source of confusion. The symbols must have meaning, and yet he has no clue what that meaning might be.

A few times, he considers asking one of the wardens, but he worries that it might be seen as an attempt to remember, and the prospect of being crowned again has bile rising in his throat. Instead, he thinks he’ll try and find the answer himself.

On a Friday morning, a little over a month after waking up in the crowning room, 4-01 approaches Sullivan in the gymnasium after his extraction and asks if he might be allowed to choose a book from the library.

“Aren’t you on laundry duty?” she asks, barely glancing up from the phone she’s looking at instead of observing the prisoners as she should be, and he shakes his head.

“That was yesterday,” he tells her. “I’m on kitchen duty today, but that isn’t for a couple of hours.”

Finally looking up at him, Sullivan sighs.

“Fine,” she says. “Go get your book.”

“Thank you,” he says, and heads out into the hallway, the metal grill of the floor digging into the soles of his feet.

At the far end of the hallway, almost to the elevator and stairwell, there’s a small, cramped room with a crowded book shelf. It wasn’t always there, he learned in his first week, when 1-03 had shown him inside, but added quite recently when Min declared that having all the prisoners sit in silence all the time was negatively affecting their study.

“They put the library in when 1-02 died,” 1-03 had explained to him as they walked down the hall.

“What happened?”

“I don’t know exactly,” 1-03 had said. “But it was during extraction. Something went wrong, and the next day we found out that we would all have a single extraction free day each week, and they set up the library.”

Now, as he stands before the overloaded shelves, 4-01 takes a deep breath. The spines are all worn, the pages bent with age. He tilts his head to look at them all, running his index finger over them in search of something with a symbol like his tattoo.

There are none. He’s not sure why he had expected differently.

He’s been in there nearly an hour before someone comes looking for him. He looks up at the curt voice abruptly.

“What are you doing, 4-01?” Min asks, eyes hard, and he feels a sudden wave of guilt for taking so long.

“Sullivan said I could come in here,” he says, and lifts the two books he’s currently holding. “I’ve been trying to decide which book to read.”

“Time’s up,” she says. “Back to your cell.”

Looking down at the books in his hands, he nods and follows her outside.

Back in the cell, he finds 1-03 drawing up their weekly work schedule from memory, using long, deft strokes. He looks up when 4-01 enters, glancing warily between him and Min.

“Keep an eye on your cell mate,” she says sharply, and turns on her heel.

“What do you have?” 1-03 asks once she’s gone. 4-01 holds the two books up to show him.

“Tomorrow is my free day,” he explains, and 1-03 nods.

“I’ve read that one,” he says, pointing at the book in his left hand-- _A Moveable Feast_ \--and smiling. “I think you’ll enjoy it.”

When 4-01 reads about oysters in _A Moveable Feast,_ he wonders if he’ll ever taste

food with such flavors. Though he tries to imagine what is being described, he feels certain that he’s never experienced anything but the bland meals they eat here.

Whatever he ate before Circadia, he thinks, mustn’t have been particularly memorable if it’s not present in his sense memory.

 _On The Road,_ on the other hand, leaves him feeling strangely wistful. Makes something like that strange longing churn at his core, pulling at him and making him restless. Certain, on some level, that he’s missing some vital piece of information.

Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty may only be characters in a story, but there’s something about them that stirs within him. The edges of a memory like what he feels in the extraction room, but warmer. A good memory. Something, he thinks, that he’d like to remember.

That night, in the hour between cleaning up the kitchen and lights out, he sits on his cot and fingers at the hem of his gray shirt.

“1-03?”

From his own cot, 1-03 looks up.

“Could I have some of your paper?”

Gathering up a few sheets, 1-03 begins to hand it over before he pauses.

“What do you need it for?”

With a glance toward the door, 4-01 lifts the edge of his shirt to show him the tattoo.

“I want to try and work out what this is.”

Furrowing his brow, 1-03 moves gracefully across the room and crouches, looking at the symbols closely before meeting 4-01’s eye.

“It might be easier if I copy them for you,” he says, and returns to his side of the room, pulling a stubby blue pencil from under his pillow.

 

 

It takes almost the full hour for him to finish copying all the symbols down, and he’s handing the paper over just as they hear the heavy thud of Ikenna’s footsteps approaching outside.

4-01 folds it up tightly, tucking it into the gap between his mattress and the wall.

“Thank you, 1-03,” he says.

“In your cot, 1-03,” Ikenna calls out from behind the glass, and 1-03 dips his head in apology, hurrying back over to his own bed. Satisfied, Ikenna keeps moving past.

A moment later, the lights go out.

For the entirety of his free day, while 1-03 is on cleaning duty followed by extraction, 4-01 sits on his cot and stares at the symbols.

With the paper spread out inside the cover of _On The Road_ , concealed from prying eyes that might pass, 4-01 scans the image over and over, trying to recall what the symbols might mean.

At the center, one symbol keeps catching.

A vertical line with a node on each end, and a large, looped shape almost like a backwards number three with an extra curve, or a coil of wire. It’s _wrong_ , he can’t help but think as he stares at it. It’s the wrong symbol.

Glancing up at the door to check that nobody is coming, he lays the book and paper flat, leaning back to tug up his shirt and look at his tattoo. There, where the strange symbol appears in the book, is a completely different one. The right one, he thinks as he traces an echo of it into the air with his finger. _My symbol. My **name**._

The thought makes something hot and frightening pulse through his veins, and he shoves his shirt back down.

He can’t shake the feeling.

Carefully, he opens the book to the back cover, where a faded yellow pocket holds a tiny slip of paper. _Property of Ontonagon Library_ it reads. He slides it out.

With 1-03’s blue pencil, he draws the symbol on the blank side, pressing down hard to make the lines as dark and heavy as he can.

“My name,” he says to himself, and is so lost in his thoughts that he doesn’t hear Min approaching until she’s almost reached his cell. Hastily, he shoves the tiny slip of paper into the waistband of his pants.

He doesn’t have time to hide the copy that 1-03 wrote for him.

Min’s eyes widen when they fall on it, her nostrils flaring, and for the briefest moment, 4-01 could swear her eyes flicker black. She stares in at him through the glass, unmoving, before slowly pulling a cell phone from her pocket.

“Godric,” she says, still staring in. “Send Ikenna back and have him prepare the crown. 4-01 is remembering.”


	7. Better The Devil

It’s been almost a month since Castiel disappeared, and they ran out of books in the bunker over a week ago. Dean feels useless. When his cell rings and it’s Crowley, he’s actually happy about it. It means he can do something besides worry.

“I’ve got some intel for you,” Crowley says when Dean asks what he wants. It’s hard to fight off the hope that crops up without pause.

“What’s the catch?”

“Why does there have to be a catch?” Crowley asks.

Dean lifts his brow.

“There’s always a catch.”

“Well, I mean if I’m scratching your back, it might be nice if you were to--”

“Please never finish that sentence,” Dean cuts him off, wrinkling his nose. “I do still need to sleep at night, and that mental image might actually kill me.”

“I’ve got information about Feathers,” Crowley says flatly, as if he’s actually offended. “But I’d like some information in return.”

“Information,” Dean repeats, dubious. “That’s all?”

“That’s all.”

“What do you want to know?”

“How you trapped Abaddon in her meatsuit,” he says, adding; “Before you pulled a Winchester and she got away.”

“Pulled a Winchester?”

“You know,” Crowley says. “Royally screwed the pooch. It’s a new saying I’m trying out, I think it’ll catch on.”

“Right.”

“So,” Crowley goes on brightly. “Interested in a trade?”

Dean pauses for a moment, looking for ways this information might come back to bite him in the ass, but when none immediately present themselves he sits up, leaning his elbows on the library table.

“Alright,” he says.

“Alright what?” Crowley asks.

“I’ll tell you how to trap her in her meatsuit,” Dean says, reaching for his notepad and pen so he can write down everything Crowley tells him. “Now what do you know about Cas?”

“A verbal contract is binding, even in trivial matters,” Crowley reminds him. “So if you try to just hang up--”

“I’ll tell you,” Dean repeats. “ _Talk_.”

“There’s a demon named Luke,” Crowley says. “You might know him, actually--he was one of Alistair’s boys.”

Dean’s mouth runs dry.

“Doesn’t ring a bell,” he says, relieved beyond belief that it’s the truth.

“He’s a real nasty one,” Crowley tells him. “Sadistic as they come. I’d almost be proud, but he’s also a traitor to the throne, so screw the bastard.”

“Are we approaching the point any time soon?” Dean asks.

“He’s been possessing a woman in Odessa for about a year. Name of Brenda Mitchell,” Crowley says. “Apparently ever since the angels fell he’s been collecting them and, well. Torturing them.”

“For what?”

“For fun.”

“And he has Cas?”

“I don’t know,” Crowley admits. “But rumor has it he’d been boasting about catching one not too long ago, so it’s the best I’ve got. Now, trapping Abaddon?”

“Carve a devil’s trap into the bullets,” Dean says.

“Really?” Crowley asks, doubt clear in his voice. “That’s all? You’re not trying to fleece me, are you?”

“Honest. Just carve it right in there, she won’t be able to budge,” Dean says, and poises his pen over his notepad. “Where’s this Luke guy holed up, anyway? Can you bring him to us?”

“I’m not your butler,” Crowley says, and the line goes dead.

Dean pulls the phone away from his ear and drops it on the table.

“Dick.”

 

Brenda Mitchell is an athletic woman of forty-five, a firefighter and a part-time basketball coach. Finding her is easy enough. Taking down the demon walking around in her skin, on the other hand, is a whole lot more difficult than usual.

It’s only through sheer dumb luck that Dean finally manages to get the upper hand, and as soon as Luke is sprawled out on the floor at the center of the hastily drawn devil’s trap Dean had managed to lead him back to in a closed-down garage, he leans forward with his hands on his knees to catch his breath.

Sam bursts into the garage a moment later, hair feathered wildly from running. Dean looks up at him as he straightens.

“Nice of you to turn up,” he says, still breathing heavily, and Sam purses his lips. “Help me tie this asshole up.”

They get him into the chair, winding the salt-soaked rope around his wrists and shins, and he wakes up in time to sneer at Dean tying the last knot.

“This is no way to treat a lady,” he says, gesturing with a smirk at the body he’s possessing, and Dean cinches the rope tighter.

“You’re one to talk,” he says.

Luke laughs darkly, rolling his head from side to side, sinuous and slow.

“Mm, but it’s cozy in here,” he says, forcing Brenda’s mouth into a lazy smile that looks utterly wrong on her face. “She’s a tough one, but there are still so many soft--”

Dean unscrews the lid of his flask and tosses holy water into the demon’s face before he can finish. He waits until he’s stopped thrashing before he catches hold of his chin, forcing eye contact.

“You done?”

“Barely,” Luke hisses, teeth flashing, and Dean drops his chin as he steps back.

“Rumor has it you caught yourself an angel.”

Black eyes stare up at him, and Luke twists Brenda’s face into a rictus grin.

“I caught a whole _flock_ ,” he says, sing-song, and there’s something in the voice that makes Dean think of Alistair singing in his ear. He pushes past the bone-deep desire to run. Takes the fear and turns it into anger.

“The last one,” Dean growls. “Tell me about the last angel you had here.”

“Oh, he was barely an angel. You should have seen his singed feathers,” Luke sneers. “He was pathetic.”

Dean narrows his eyes.

“Where is he?”

Luke barks out a laugh.

“Gone.”

“Gone where?”

Luke’s lips stretch back over his gums in a bloody smile.

“Doesn’t matter. You won’t find him.”

Dean takes a breath, forcing himself to stay calm.

“Did you know his name?” he asks.

“I did,” Luke says. “But it’ll cost you.”

Dean picks up the blade and makes a show of twirling it in his hand. Luke just laughs again.

“Go ahead,” he says, baring his neck. “Dear old Brenda is _begging_ for it. Dig and slice and _gouge_. She looks great in red.”

“She’s still awake in there?” Dean asks, and Luke grins, adopting a high falsetto.

“Please don’t hurt me, please don’t!”

The impersonation falls apart in a maniacal giggle. Beside him, Dean sees Sam shift uncomfortably.

“Has she been awake the whole time, you sick sonofabitch?” Dean asks, advancing. “Did you make her watch everything you did?”

“Always,” Luke says, dark eyes glinting. “What can I say, I like the company.”

Smiling pleasantly, Dean returns his blade to his belt and straightens up, holding back a spiteful laugh at the confused look on the demon’s face.

“Good to know,” he says, looking over at his brother. “Sam? Want to send this sack of crap back to Hell?”

Sam clears his throat and approaches.

“ _Exorcizamus te, omnis immundus spiritus_ \--”

Luke’s eyes go wide, jaw twitching as he tries to fight the exorcism.

“You sonofa--”

“-- _omnis satanica potestas, omnis incursio infernalis adversarii_ \--”

With a great lurch Luke yanks his right hand upward, splintering the arm of the chair to free it from the ropes, and punches himself hard in the face, once, twice, splitting Brenda’s lip.

Dean lurches forward, catching hold and pushing his hand down.

“Keep going, Sam,” he grunts, struggling to hold the demon still.

“-- _omnis legio, omnis congregatio et secta diabolica. Ergo, draco maledicte. Ecclesiam tuam securi tibi facias libertate servire, te rogamus, audi nos._ ”

With the final word, the black plume of smoke crashes into the cement floor, blasting outward and crackling with electricity. In the chair, Brenda Mitchell slumps forward, breathing heavily.

“Brenda,” Dean says, and lifts his palms away from her, stepping back when she flinches at the sound of his voice. “He’s gone. You’re safe now.”

She’s trembling all over, eyes welling up with tears, but she drags in a shaky breath. Nods once, firmly, as if confirming to Dean that he’s right.

“Will he come back?” she grinds out through a mouthful of blood, her breath coming in short, sharp gasps.

“No,” Dean tells her, watching how she stares down at her bruised, bloody knuckle, flexing the fingers as though she’s seeing them for the first time. “And we’ll show you how to protect yourself before we leave, okay?”

“Okay,” she says, closing her eyes as she slows her breathing, visibly trying to calm herself.

“I’m just going to untie you, alright?” he says, approaching slowly, and he doesn’t start until she nods, her jaw tight as she grinds her teeth together, breathing slowly through her nose.

“Are you alright?” Dean asks once he’s done. For a long moment there’s no reply. Finally she opens her eyes, lifting her fingers to her mouth and pressing them against her front teeth.

“I think he chipped my tooth,” she says, dazed, and Dean suppresses the impulse to laugh in relief.

“You’ll be okay,” Sam says, smiling, and she nods.

“I’ll be okay.”

“Brenda, I get that you’ve been through a lot,” Sam says, voice soft in that way that seems like second nature for him. “But we need to know--the demon said you were awake the whole time. Was that true?”

“Yes,” she says, jaw twitching as she nods. “I... I was awake.”

“Do you remember what happened?” Dean asks. He tries to sound as tactful as Sam; it still sounds pushy. He hopes she doesn’t notice.

“He--it--the demon took me about... about ten, eleven months ago,” Brenda says, her voice hoarse and tremulous. “I was... I’d been at the gym, and I got home and when I... when I opened the door, there was this smoke everywhere. Pure black. It didn’t smell right, and I thought it must have been a chemical fire or something, but before I could do anything-- it-- he just--”

The rest of the sentence is lost, Brenda’s throat closing up around an aborted sob, and Sam hands her his flask of holy water. She takes a tiny sip and catches her breath, wiping at her eyes with a trembling hand.

“He was... he was really a demon, wasn’t he?” she asks, looking up at Sam with wild eyes.

“Those really were angels that fell? They weren’t just meteors?”

Sam nods, and Brenda heaves out a breath.

“He found one just after it happened,” she says, staring into the middle distance as she remembers. “He was... he was so _happy_. He wanted to tear her to pieces, and he--”

Brenda pauses, swallowing back bile.

“He spent days just... butchering her. He-- God, he got off on it. I was-- he used my hands, my _teeth_ \-- the things he made me--”

“Brenda, hey-- it wasn’t you, alright?” Dean tells her. “None of it was you.”

Brenda nods.

“When he was done with her he went out to find another one. It took a while... maybe a month or two, but he found another in August. He kept this one a lot longer. He said he wanted to take his time... wanted to take his time destroying him.”

“Do you know that angel’s name? What he looked like?”

“Adda--,” she says after a moment, and Dean feels a strange mix of relief and disappointment that it wasn’t Castiel. “The angel’s name was... it sounded like _Ada-eh-oh-etah._ He--his vessel, right?”

Dean nods.

“His vessel was real tall. Almost as tall as you,” she says, looking at Sam. “He was Indian. Thin, and... He was gentle. Softly spoken, when he spoke directly to me. He didn’t do that much. It pissed Luke off.” With a shudder, Brenda goes on. “He had him in the basement for almost two months.”

“Then what happened?”

“Luke was boasting about catching him,” Brenda says.

“To who?”

Brenda lets out a bitter laugh, shaking her head slightly.

“Anyone who’d listen. But then in October he went to this bar over in Midland, and some other demons turned up... said they’d heard he had an angel and wanted to congratulate him. It was obvious they were setting him up, but he was an idiot. He took the bait, lead them back to show off, and they overpowered him. Made him hand Adaeoet over to them.”

“How many demons were there?”

“Just two,” she says. “But they were strong. Much stronger than Luke.”

“Do you remember anything about them? Anything that might help us find them?”

Furrowing her brow, Brenda thinks.

“One was a woman. She was really pale, with a lot of freckles and red hair. Young--maybe twenty-five?”

“Was she short?” Dean asks, and she nods.

“Compared to you? Yeah. She would have been about five-five.”

“What about the other one?” Sam asks.

“He was possessing a tall black guy, not much older, and really well dressed. Good-looking,” she adds. “Despite the eyes.”

“Did you catch their names?” Dean asks hopefully, and she shakes her head.

“I don’t think so,” she says, then frowns. “They mentioned someone else, though. Someone named... Goddard?” She squints, trying to remember. “No... it was Godric. They had to move quickly, because Godric was waiting for them in Rockland.”

“Rockland?” Dean repeats. “Where is that?”

“I don’t know,” she admits. “That’s all they said.”

“It helps a lot, Brenda,” Sam tells her, and she relaxes a little.

“Did they mention any other angels?” Dean asks. “Did you hear the name Castiel?”

“I don’t think so,” she frowns. “Why?”

“He’s a friend,” Sam says. “An angel. It’s who we’re looking for. Why we found you.”

“I’m sorry,” she says, shaking her head. “I don’t recognize the name. But the demons... they did say they had more angels. I don’t know what they were planning to do with them, but they were in Rockland too.”

“Is that all?”

“I think so.”

They drive her to the hospital before they leave for the motel, pausing in the parking lot to talk to her through the window.

“You sure you don’t want company?” Sam asks her, and she looks over her shoulder at the entrance.

“No,” she says. “I’ll be alright on my own.”

Before they leave, Dean hands her one of their phony FBI cards, his cell number scrawled messily on the back. She looks it over, raising her brow at the side that says SPECIAL AGENT MARC BOLAN.

“Big T-Rex fan?” she asks, and Dean grins.

“I guess you might say I’m a 20th Century Boy,” he says.

She laughs, shaking her head as she stands, and the sound is a relief. Proof that despite what she’s been through, she’s going to be alright.

“You remember anything else,” Sam says, “or you need help with something, just give us a call. Any time.”

“Thank you,” she says, and turns for the hospital doors. Just before they drive away she pauses, looking back to call out. “Good luck finding your friend!”

 

 

 

 

Back in their motel room, Dean sits with one of their thick volumes on Enochian angels and flips through the pages while Sam gets to work on finding Rockland.

The angel, Dean works out pretty quickly, is Adaeoet. A senior angel of fire, associated with Jupiter and possessing a quiet yet zealous disposition.

He copies the symbol that represents Adaeoet’s true name into his journal as he reads it aloud to Sam.

“If he’s associated with Jupiter, he might be one of the few who still had Cas’ back,” Sam says.

“I hope so.”

Sam gives him a tight smile before he shifts the laptop to show the screen.

“Alright, so. There’s... eighteen places called Rockland.”

“Any we can rule out?”

“Well, four are in the UK, plus three in Canada, so we’ll scratch those for now. That leaves eleven.”

“Eleven?” Dean groans.

“Wait,” Sam says. “One of these is Rockland County. If it was there they’d just say the name of the town, not the county. Right?”

“Yeah, probably.”

“So that makes it ten-- oh. Crap,” Sam scrunches his nose and clicks through a couple of links. “Scratch that. Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and West Virginia all have multiple Rocklands.”

Rubbing his knuckles over his eyes in a fruitless effort to push back his growing tension headache, Dean sighs.

“Of course they do,” he says. “How many?”

“Two, three, and two. So, all up... fourteen possible places we can drive to. And they’re all over; California, Delaware, Michigan, Maine, Idaho--”

“So basically half the states currently buried under three feet of snow,” Dean says. “Excellent. That won’t slow us down at all.”

“There’s gotta be some way we can narrow it down,” Sam says, frowning at the screen.

“Maybe...”

Quickly, he taps out a query--

ROCKLAND * USA, “ELECTRICAL STORM” “CATTLE MUTILATION” “SULFUR” date range:2013..2014

\--and hits search. Nothing comes up but a twitter feed for a student film that snuck through the cracks of his search parameters. He pushes a hand through his hair and glances back at Dean.

“Any ideas?”

“Maybe,” Dean says, pushing lightly at his shoulder to make him move out of the way, and types in his own search.

ROCKLAND * USA, “BURNING BUSH” “WEEPING STATUE” “GLOSSOLALIA” “PHANTOM VOICES” date range:2013..2014

“Glossolalia?” Sam says, lifting his brow like he’s surprised Dean knows the word. “Why would anyone be speaking in tongues?”

“When Crowley was torturing Alfie,” Dean explains, hitting search, “his pain caused a bush to burst into flame. I figure if we want to find kidnapped angels, look for crap the church calls miracles. And--” he waves a hand at the results on screen with a grim smile, “--yahtzee. Rose bushes burst into flame in Rockland, Michigan despite freezing weather.”

“When?” Sam asks, pulling the laptop closer and opening the article to answer his own question. “January twentieth.”

“Day after Cas went missing,” Dean says, and clicks back out to the main search. “And look-- we have a crying statue on February sixth, another burning bush back in November, and there-- local baker speaking in tongues. October fourteenth. That’s probably about the time they grabbed Adaeoet.”

Pushing to his feet, Dean looks at the time. It’s just after eight.

“So. Michigan is about a days drive, right?” he asks, and Sam looks up at him.

“Twenty hours, I think. The snow’ll probably slow us down, though.”

“Alright, you want to gas up and grab some road food while I pack? If we haul ass we should be able to get there tomorrow night, then look around the day after.”

Closing the laptop, Sam rolls his head from side to side, cracking his neck.

“You good to take the first shift driving?” he asks, and Dean nods. He’s practically buzzing with adrenaline, his fear at the thought of Cas having been in enough pain to set fire to someone’s prize winning roses overshadowed only by the realization that there haven’t been any more manifestations of angelic agony since the first week of February.

As much as he wants to be glad that it means Cas probably isn’t being tortured right now, he can’t help but worry that it’s because he’s already dead.

Sam heads out, closing the door quietly, and as Dean starts gathering their things he can’t stop thinking about it. That somewhere out there, Cas is laying under a pile of snow, body cold and empty.

He shakes off the thought and forces himself to picture something else, turning the radio on to help calm him down. Singing along to an old James Taylor song, he pictures Cas alive. Sitting in some moderately unpleasant basement waiting for them to bust him out, his expression growing stonier with every day because he doesn’t know they’re coming.

Dean falters at that though, a pair of socks shoved halfway into his duffel bag.

He hasn’t been praying. Neither of them have. They knew he’d been taken, so calling him back seemed pointless. Now though, it occurs to Dean that he should have been praying anyway. For all he knows, Cas is locked in some dank, dark room, with nothing to keep him company but the thoughts in his own head.

Dumping the half-packed duffel bag on the floor, Dean drops to his knees beside the bed and folds his hands together, pressing the knuckles against his forehead. He only stops praying when he hears the rumble of the Impala’s return.


	8. Lotus

 

Next door, 1-06 has a cell to herself.

According to the whispering of the other inmates, Sullivan dug too deep during an extraction not long before 4-01 arrived, and 1-06's old roommate had foamed at the mouth for a few long, agonizing minutes before he finally slumped motionless in the chair and his eyes clouded over.

Now, 1-06 has taken to folding pages from a book her roommate had been reading into strange, intricate shapes like paper flowers. Dozens of them decorate the shelf behind her.

“How does she know how to do it?" 4-01 asks, standing beside 1-03 in the doorway as they prepare to go to the gymnasium. 1-03 shrugs.

“She was crowned a few times because of it,” he says quietly, “but for some reason she still knew how.”

“Muscle memory,” 4-01 says.

“I suppose. She doesn’t remember anything else, though. That’s the only reason they don’t stop her.

"Hmm," 4-01 says, and before they walk away he taps on the glass of her open door. 1-06 looks up at him with wide eyes. "Will you teach me to make one of those?"

Glancing down at the paper in her hands, 1-06 looks back up at him and nods. She doesn't speak.

"I'll come back later," he tells her.

“Why do you want to learn?” 1-03 asks him a few minutes later, and 4-01 can’t easily put it into words.

“I feel as though… if I can train my hands to remember something, it might bring me comfort if I get crowned again.”

1-03 smiles.

“That’s a nice thought,” he says.

 

 

Extraction always comes around sooner than he feels it should, and each time, the slow approach to the room makes 4-01’s stomach tense. They have to wait in line, even if they aren’t due for another hour. The wait is almost as agonizing as the extraction itself.

The room has stark white walls and a polished floor, and the chrome sink against the far wall is reflective and glossy. The chair at the center is lowered and ready to be occupied. 4-01 moves to sit without being prompted.

Today, Sullivan is performing the extractions, and as soon as 4-01 is seated she crosses the room to wash her hands at the sink. It's as he's settling back against the chair that he feels something brush against his hip, and when he slides his hand along the edge of the seat padding he feels a slip of paper, folded up tight. Sullivan turns back to him, drying her hands.

He snatches his own hand back and folds it with the other one on his lap.

"You got anything to report?" she asks him before she starts, pulling a pair of thick blue gloves onto her hands, and he shakes his head.

"I had a little trouble falling asleep last night," he admits. "But otherwise I’ve been normal since my last crowning."

She nods, feet dragging on the floor as she moves around to her cart and picks up a tablet. She taps the screen before looking up at him.

She doesn't need to ask any of the questions; they've been going through the same things every day for the past month.

"Seven hours sleep. No dreams. No phantom voices. No violent urges.”

“Memories?” she prompts, and he shakes his head. The thought of mentioning that this room stirs them in him each time he’s in it is terrifying.

“Alright,” she says, and takes hold of his chin, tilting his head back as she shines a bright light into his eyes. The needle she seems to produce from thin air.

It’s always longer than he remembers, and though he knows it’s pointless, it’s difficult not to struggle away. It only takes one sentence to make him still.

“Do I need to restrain you?”

“No,” he says quickly, and forces out a slow breath through his nose, closing his eyes for a moment before opening them and staring up at the focus point drawn on the ceiling. “I’ll be still.”

She doesn’t speak again; just holds his chin steady as she slowly slides the needle tip into the inner corner of his eye. He feels every millimeter, parting flesh, barely skimming the fragile tissue of his sclera.

He’s never quite sure how long it takes. Just that it’s too long. Endless. Agony like having a limb torn off, bones slowly snapped, teeth pulled out.

When it finally ends, he’s dizzy and weak, and whatever was taken from him has already been removed from the room. Standing near the chute in the wall that he has long suspected is the exit route for whatever it is, Sullivan taps the tablet a few more times, then nods to herself, apparently satisfied.

She looks up when she notices he’s cognizant and gestures for him to take his medication.

"Take those and you can go," she tells him, and returns to the sink again to wash her hands clean. He watches her, unmoving, and can’t stop thinking of the paper he felt. He’s certain he should take it. When she turns around to find him still seated, she lifts her brow.

"I wasn’t asking," she tells him. “Take your pills and send the next one in.”

"Yes," he says, shaking his head, and scrambles to his feet, picking up the pills and tossing them into his mouth. He eyes the chair.

“4-01,” Sullivan says, glaring at him, and he speaks through the mouthful of pills.

“I think I need water,” he mumbles. “They’re sticking.”

As soon as she turns to fill a cup for him, he grabs the paper and stuffs it into his waistband.

For the rest of the day, 4-01 feels the paper scratching against his hip. He’s not even sure if there’s anything written on it, but every time he lets his fingertips drift toward it, he hears someone approaching and guiltily moves his hand away. By lights out, he’s given up on looking at it. As soon as he’s laying in bed he digs it from his waistband and pushes it into his pillowcase.

Sleep comes slowly.

 

 

It’s the middle of the night, and someone is singing.

4-01 wakes abruptly, his heart racing in his chest, and tries to place the voice.

Across the room, 1-03 appears fast asleep, sprawled out on his cot with one foot sticking out from under his blue blanket. His dark hair shifts with every rattling snore. 4-01 looks toward the glass front of their room, watching for any sign of movement in the hall. It should be Sullivan on patrol. He sees no sign of her.

Carefully he pushes out of bed and pads over to the glass. He presses his ear against it, listening.

“What are you doing?”

1-03 is sitting up, staring at him with a frown.

“Do you hear that?”

“What?”

“ _I’ve sunny days that I thought would never end_ ,” 4-01 says, listening to the song in his head. “It’s a song. Someone is singing. You can’t hear it?”

1-03 shakes his head, and 4-01 listens harder, holding his breath as he strains to hear. All at once he realizes that it isn’t coming from the hall. It’s in his head, and yet not comprised of his own thought.

With one hand still resting against the cool glass, he drags in a shuddering breath and closes his eyes, hoping that blocking out all other senses might help him to focus on the song.

“I’m only catching... parts. Moments of it,” he says.

“I can’t hear anything.”

“Do you think...” 4-01 frowns, shaking his head. “It’s stopped.”

He lets out a long, shaky breath.

“That question they ask,” he says, looking back at 1-03. “During extraction, they ask us about phantom voices. Is this--do you think this is what they mean?”

“I don’t know,” 1-03 admits, though he looks nervous, and the sight makes 4-01’s pulse stutter.

“Don’t tell them I heard it.”

There’s a long moment before 1-03 replies, a tense pause that makes him fear the crown will be his fate, but then his cell mate sighs.

“I won’t,” he promises.

“Thank you.”

“4-01, did you... did you ever work out what those symbols meant?”

In confusion, 4-01 squints over at him in the dark, something nervous fluttering in his chest.

“What symbols?”

“Your tattoo.”

Shaking his head, 4-01 touches his fingers to his hip.

“How-- how did you know I’d been--”

1-03’s face falters, eyes registering some kind of grim shock.

“They found the paper,” he says, and 4-01’s eyes widen, glancing involuntarily toward his pillowcase.

“What paper?” he asks, and 1-03 sits up.

“They crowned you, didn’t they?”

“I don’t--” 4-01 shakes his head, trying to remember. “Yes. The day before yesterday, I think.”

He looks back at 1-03.

“You said I had a paper?”

He digs the slip of paper he’d found out from where he’s been hiding it in his pillow case and holds it up, squinting in the dim light from the hallway. There’s a symbol there. The writing looks like his own.

“Is this it?”

1-03 stares at it, thumb smoothing the creases, before looking back up to meet 4-01’s eyes.

“No," he says. "This is different, but--”

“It’s familiar,” 4-01 tells him, looking at it intently. “It’s on my tattoo, right in the middle, but... beyond that.”

He shakes his head, chewing on his lip.

“Looking at it is like being called,” he says carefully. “Like a name.”

It seems absurd to even suggest it. It has been months since he heard his name. He wonders who he is without it. If he really is nothing more than subject 4-01, or if there’s more to the self than the name it is given.

Sometimes, he imagines himself described in the books he reads, riding in a car, standing at the seaside. He’d need a name for that. He wants that. He doesn’t deserve it.

“Don’t let them see it,” 1-03 tells him, handing it back, and 4-01 nods tightly.

“I won’t.”

Moments after he lays back down, the song comes back into his head, but it’s disjointed now.

A different tune, and all in pieces as a voice fades in and out.

 _Cas--Castiel_ , the voice begins, and 4-01 feels something lurch inside him in recognition of the name. Under his pillow, his hand closes around the paper. _I uh, I hope you’ve got your ears on, buddy._

The voice is deep and rough and tired, and familiar. So _familiar_.

_Sorry I haven’t been keeping in touch, but I just wanted to let you know we’re coming for you._

His fingers tighten in the thin blanket, pulling it more securely around his body.

_We tracked down one of the mooks that’s been kidnapping your brothers and sisters, and we’re pretty sure you’re in the same place. Maybe you’ve met the one he told us about--Adaeoet?_

“Adaeoet,” Castiel-- _Castiel, that’s his name, not 4-01, he knows, he knows_ \--whispers aloud, and on the other side of the room the blankets shift. Castiel looks across as the voice continues.

_Tall Indian guy? He’s uh... gentle, apparently. Soft voice._

In his gut, Castiel knows, beyond a doubt, that the voice means 1-03. 1-03 is Adaeoet. He wants to say the name again, to call him and find out if he will know his name at that moment, too, but he’s afraid. Knowing your name is a memory. Memories get you crowned.

 _If he’s there,_ the voice goes on, _you know we’re on the right track. If not, well... I’m sure we’ll find you soon anyway. I’m kind of an expert by now, right Cas? Found you after the reservoir, found you in Purgatory…_

A feeling of desperate longing burns through him, then, and though he can’t tell where it came from he can feel it echoed in himself. Reaching back out to wherever the owner of this voice is.

_Just... hold on. I’ll find you, Cas._

Cas, Cas, Castiel. His name is Castiel. He squeezes the paper in his fist again and breathes as steadily as he can.

_Forget all that crap I said about wanting to be on my own, about being poison. You were right. We’re the same, you and me. Too trusting. We make dumb mistakes because we’re trying so hard to make things better, but we’re not monsters, Cas._

“We’re not monsters,” Castiel repeats.

_We’re the good guys, and we need to stick together. Hell, I just need your weird ass around, okay? Okay._

The voice goes silent, then, and for a long time Castiel lays in the still dark, waiting for it to speak again. It doesn’t. Across the room, 1-03--Adaeoet--begins to snore.

“My name is Castiel,” he whispers into the dark. “We are not monsters, and they’re coming to save us.”


	9. Rockland

 

The headlights finally catch on a sign welcoming them to Rockland, Michigan, and Dean reaches across the console to prod Sam awake.

“We’re here,” he says when Sam snorts in bleary confusion, and shoves his cell phone into his hand without taking his eyes off the icy road. “Find us someplace to stay.”

Sam blinks, yawning loudly as he thumbs the phone. It’s a few minutes of huffing before he speaks.

“Rockland doesn’t have a motel,” he says, his voice still rough with sleep. “Closest one’s in Greenland, about half an hour north-east.”

“Check the real estate listings for vacancies, then,” Dean says. He catches his brother’s incredulous look even in the dark. “What?”

“Dean, it’s like eight degrees.”

“So?”

“So we can’t crash in an empty house in this weather. We need somewhere with heating. You want to wake up with hypothermia? How are we gonna find Cas if we freeze to death?”

Sighing, Dean lifts one hand from the wheel to scrub at his eyes.

“Yeah, okay, you’re right. Just tell me where to go.”

“Keep heading this way for now,” Sam tells him, turning off the screen and shuffling in his seat. “Take a right when we hit the main road.”

The road is bumpy and dark, and the Impala’s ancient heating system is struggling to keep up with the frosty Michigan air. Dean feels like he’s going to die if they don’t get somewhere warm soon.

The first motel they see in Greenland is a run down clapboard building on the side of the road into town, and though the light out front is on, there’s no cars in the lot, and nobody comes to the window when they press the buzzer by the door.

“Come on,” Dean groans, cupping his hands to peer through the cloudy glass. Inside, it’s dusty and quiet. A red light on an old landline blinks lazily on the desk with an unheard message.

Behind him, Sam leans out of the car.

“Dean, the sign says no check ins after ten.”

Glancing back, Dean huffs out a breath that hangs in front of him in a cloud.

“What time is it?”

“Almost one,” Sam says, pulling a face, but he holds up his phone and wriggles it in the air. “There’s another place in the town proper that has 24 hour check in.”

Another twenty minutes brings them to a much more welcoming red brick building, and a frazzled-looking woman drags herself to the reception desk after only a couple of minutes.

“Evening,” she says, blinking herself awake and shielding her mouth on a yawn. “Excuse me.”

“Sorry it’s so late,” Sam says.

“It’s not a problem,” she tells them through another yawn. “What are you after?”

“A double, if you have it.”

“No doubles left,” she says apologetically. “I do have two singles next to each other, though.”

“That’s fine,” Sam says, and slides his credit card across the desk.

“How long are you staying?”

Sam glances over at Dean, who shrugs.

“Make it three days,” he says. “Might end up being longer, though.”

“Done.”

She checks them in quickly--Dean figures about a third of that is good customer service, and the rest is her own desire to get back to bed--and once she’s directed them to their room Sam gives her a wide, grateful smile.

“Thanks,” he says, for possibly the eighth time. “We’re really sorry to have woken you, ah--”

“Ruth,” she says at his upward inflection, and returns his smile. “It’s fine, really. Let me know if you need anything, alright?”

“Will do, Ruth,” Sam says. “Thanks again.”

The moment she’s gone, Dean raises his brow at his brother.

“What?” Sam asks.

“I didn’t say anything,” Dean tells him.

The room is blessedly warm, and Dean collapses face first onto the bed. There’s a peppermint on the pillow. He peels the wrapper off and tosses it vaguely toward the waste paper basket on the other side of the room. It gets about a foot away from the bed before sinking slowly to the floor.

He’s starving hungry--they hadn’t stopped for food since the late afternoon--but he still only manages half of it before his stomach protests. The rest ends up on the bedside table. He should sleep, he knows, but it’s already March, and Castiel has been missing for over a month.

 _Tomorrow_ , he tells himself. _We’ll find him tomorrow._

There’s a coffee pot on the narrow table by the bathroom door, and he turns it on before he settles onto his knees at the foot of the bed.

It feels absurd to do--praying to Cas, more often than not, can be accomplished with the words _get your ass down here_ \--but under the circumstances Dean wouldn’t be above lighting incense and ringing a bell if he had access to either.

“We’re close, now, Cas,” he starts, shifting his knees to get comfortable. “Pretty sure you’re around here somewhere, so just... sit tight. We’ll be there soon. Take you someplace warm once we find you, yeah? Somewhere with a beach. Florida, maybe.”

He clears his throat, blinking his eyes open to look at the frilly bedclothes in front of him, and shakes his head. What is he doing, planning a vacation?

 _Yeah_ , he decides. _That’s exactly what I’m doing._

“We’ll go to the beach, Cas,” he says. “You, me, and Sammy. Soak in some sun and be... be normal people for a couple of days.”

He rubs at his eyes and tightens his hands again.

“We’ll find you soon, Cas. I’ll be there soon.”


	10. Over The Hills And Far Away

 

 

“We’ve been compromised,” Min says, walking into the room without knocking. “The warning sigils I set up on the road into Rockland were tripped last night.”

“Not so loud,” Godric says quietly, staring up at the vials of grace that line the walls, watching as the contents of every vial folds in on itself in an endless flow. “Tripped how?”

“There are multiple sigils, each detect the presence of different things--angels, other demons, fae, and hunters. All of them were tripped simultaneously.”

“An angel, a demon, a hunter, and a fairy walk into a bar,” Godric says, and finally drags his attention away from the Grace. Min bites down on the inside of her cheek in frustration.

“This is serious, Godric.”

“Do we know who it is?”

“I checked the CCTV footage for the motel out there,” she says, holding up her tablet to show him the grainy image of a long, black car pulled up in the parking lot. “It’s the Winchesters. You know if they’re here they’ve probably got back up. They work with everyone. Heaven and Hell, and the older one’s been to Faerie. Half the time Crowley’s in their back pocket.”

Godric sighs and takes a phone from his pocket.

“Alright,” he says. “I’ll take care of it.”

“What are we going to do? It’s far too soon to move to phase two.”

“I know,” he agrees. “There’s nowhere near enough yet. But I’ll make a few calls. Don’t worry. Business as usual until I say otherwise.”

Tense, Min nods, and Godric pats her cheek. If he were anyone else she’d bite him for the condescending gesture.

“It’s fine,” he tells her. “Get back to work.”


	11. Got To Break Free

 

The morning after the song, Castiel awakes and knows himself.

There are still gaps--mostly gaps, really--but his name is true, and when he looks across the room to see 1-03 he thinks _you are Adaeoet, and we are not monsters._

All through the morning he feels a longing; that strange, phantom pain belonging to someone else and reaching out toward him from a distance. It’s closer, though. Much closer. He finds that something in him wants to reach back.

As the day drags on he feels it growing stronger, distracting him through his duties in the laundry and even during extraction, and hours after lights out he is woken abruptly to hear that voice again. It is closer, now. Castiel could have told that even if the voice hadn’t said it.

It takes him a long time to sleep after the voice stops, and when he does he dreams of all the things it had described. Sun and sand and warm water. _You, me, and Sammy,_ the voice had said.

He wants desperately to know who that is. Who the voice belongs to. The voice is important, he knows. The most important.

Idly, he touches his thumb to the tan line on his ring finger, and wonders if it is the same as the source of the longing. If this man whose face he cannot picture, whose name he cannot hear, is the one whose arms he’s been aching for.

Now, standing in the hall as he waits in line for his daily extraction, he hears Min and Godric speaking in hushed voices as they approach the hallway. Ahead of him, he sees two of the others cock their heads a little as they listen, too. It’s not surprising--though Godric is a name they’ve all heard, it isn’t often that he’s here.

“Alaska,” Godric says, and Min laughs.

“Couldn’t find somewhere cold?”

“I like the cold,” he says. “It reminds me of home. ”

Castiel feels his skin prickle at the comment, and looks back at the others to find 2-04 frowning in confusion.

“Is it--” Min starts, and Godric cuts her off.

“Yes, it’s up to your standards. As if I could stand to put up with you if it wasn’t perfect.”

“We _need_ perfect conditions,” Min says. “You know that. If they’re compromised, if the grace is compromised--”

Godric laughs, low and dark. _Grace_ , Castiel thinks. _Why is that familiar?_

“I know, Min.”

“How soon?”

“Tonight,” Godric says. “Have them ready by ten.”

“And _how_ exactly are we moving them? Someone’s going to notice us taking seventeen--”

“I’ll make sure everything is in place,” he says, cutting her off again. “Just make sure they’re... subdued. This whole thing will go a lot more smoothly if they aren’t riled up.”

“Should I cancel the rest of the extractions?”

“How many are left?”

“Around half. I think 3-01 is in right now.”

Godric clicks his tongue.

“Cancel them,” he says. “I’d rather have them ready early. We can do without half for one day.”

Godric’s hand on the doorknob is enough notice for the waiting prisoners to pretend they hadn’t heard a thing, and it’s only through daily practice that none of them turn when they hear his footsteps moving up toward the elevator. Castiel isn’t certain, but he thinks he spends most of his time on level three. No prisoner access.

Min walks past them all, stopping at the door to the extraction room and pushing it open without knocking. Through it, Castiel catches a glimpse of 3-01 strapped into the chair, Sullivan poised over him with the needle. At the interruption, Sullivan jerks upward, slipping with the needle and dragging it harshly up through 3-01’s throat. Blue-white light pours from the wound, floating up toward the ceiling before dispersing into the air. 3-01 falls limp.

Though none of them had been speaking, a kind of horrified hush falls over the prisoners in the hall.

“Fuck,” Sullivan says loudly, voice echoing out into the quiet, her shoulders slumping as she looks over at Min. “That was your fault.”

“I doubt Godric will see it that way.”

“You should have knocked.”

“ _You_ should have a steadier hand,” Min retorts. “Clean this up. No further extractions today.”

“What? Why not?”

Min doesn’t reply, but whatever the look on her face is, it’s enough to make Sullivan scramble to follow the order.

“Return to your cells,” Min commands sharply as she steps back out into the hall, not bothering to look any of them in the eye. “Medication will be at six tonight.”

 

In their cell, Castiel finds Adaeoet sitting on the floor by his cot with his eyes closed.

“There’s someone coming,” he says as Castiel walks in. “Can you sense it? I feel as though someone is looking for me.”

“There is,” Castiel agrees.

At this, Adaeoet opens his eyes.

“How do you--”

Castiel taps on his temple, hoping that Adaeoet understands.

“Something I heard. He’s looking for both of us.”

“You heard that?” Adaeoet asks, scrambling to his feet and lowering his voice. “Are you… Who is he?”

“I don’t know,” Castiel admits. “But he knows me. Or he did, before. I think...”

He looks at his ring finger again.

“I think I may have been married to him,” he says, and Adaeoet lifts his brow. “Or something similar. I don’t actually remember, but...”

“You feel it,” Adaeoet says, and Castiel nods.

“There’s something else,” Castiel says. “3-01 is dead.”

Adaeoet widens his eyes.

“What happened?”

“Sullivan,” he says. “She slipped.”

“That _butcher_ ,” Adaeoet all but hisses. “Haven’t I said it? She’s the worst of all of them. Min might be sadistic, but at least she’s precise enough that she’d only kill you if she meant to.”

“Extractions have been cancelled for the rest of the day.”

“Because of 3-01?” Adaeoet asks, forehead crinkling in confusion, and Castiel shakes his head.

“Because they’re moving us tonight. I think it might have something to do with the man who’s looking for us. It’s too much of a coincidence. They were alerted to him somehow.”

“They’re moving us? Where?”

“Alaska,” he says, and at the sound of approaching footsteps Adaeoet sits back down, feigning calm and dropping his voice lower still.

“Do you have any idea where we are now?”

“That remains to be seen,” Castiel replies, and sits cross-legged on the floor opposite Adaeoet. “They’re planning to subdue us before the move.”

For a long moment, Adaeoet studies him. The footsteps come and go.

“You’re planning to work around that, I’m guessing?” he says, finally, and Castiel nods.

“Yes.”

“How?”

“After they’ve given us our medication, we go to the bathroom and throw it back up.”

Adaeoet pulls a face.

“Do you have a better idea?” Castiel asks him, and he slumps.

“No,” he admits, and sighs. “Then what?”

“We act like the medication is working, feign sleep, and make a break for it when they’re moving us outside.”

“What about the others?” Adaeoet asks, and Castiel smiles.

“I was getting to that. We don’t need to worry about them just yet. They already lost one of us today,” Castiel points out, “and two yesterday. They can’t afford to lose any more, so they won’t hurt any of us. They probably won’t kill us.”

“That’s a pretty big thing to rest on a probably,” Adaeoet says. Castiel shrugs.

“It’s still the best chance we’ve got.”

“You’re right.”

“What’s more, we know that we’re being taken somewhere in Alaska. We just need to still be here when... when the people looking for us arrive. They tracked us here on less.”

Adaeoet nods.

“Alright,” he says. “Is there anything we should do beforehand?”

“We should set up some failsafes,” Castiel says. “We only have a few hours, but I think we should leave some information in plain sight if we can. Just in case something goes wrong and we can’t expel the medication.”

“Alright, in that case I’ll--”

“Don’t tell me what you’re doing,” Castiel says. “If they realize that one of us is up to something, they might try to force it out of us. Better to cut off all contact from this point onward.”

“Agreed,” Adaeoet says.

Without warning, he stands and yanks Castiel into a swift hug, squeezing tightly.

“I’ll see you on the outside.”


	12. Grasp

The population of Rockland comes in at less than five hundred people, which is good on one hand--it means that anything odd going on tends to be noticed--but on the other, it makes them naturally disinclined to trust strangers.

In the end, it takes nearly two days of canvassing before someone admits to seeing a short white redhead and a tall black guy in a van, and they’re pointed in the direction of what used to be a mine out in the hills before some pharmaceutical company bought it out and turned it into a research facility in the late nineties.

“You’ll want to head out on Chequamegon Road,” the gas-station attendant tells them, pointing vaguely to the west. “Keep on going past the trailhead, and you’ll see the signs from there. PharmaSect, it’s called. The actual facility closed down years ago, but the van had the logo and it was heading out toward the old Circadia Mine.”

“Thanks,” Dean tells him, and he can’t stop the manic grin that forces its way onto his face. “You’ve been a huge help.”

The sign out front still says PharmaSect, though it’s clearly no longer in use, and they pull the Impala into a patch of trees a little ways past the gate.

Making their way back on foot, Dean keeps his eyes peeled for movement as they walk through the gate. There’s nothing.

Given that it’s a refashioned mine, there’s only one way in, and it poses a problem right up until Dean notices the door is ajar. It’s not exactly promising--more than anything it stinks of a trap--but there’s no cars parked outside, and they’re shit out of other options right now.

“Tire-tread looks familiar,” Dean says quietly, pointing at the ground, and Sam nods as he clicks off the safety on his gun.

It’s pitch dark inside until they get about five paces in, boots echoing loud on the metal grate flooring. Overhead fluorescents flick on automatically, humming loud. They both pause, looking back the way they’d come before pressing on.

The interior door is closed fully, but all it takes is a shove to get it open. Inside, the hallway is long and stark. An elevator stands open to one side, and they ignore it, moving instead toward the stairs.

When they reach the lower floors, Dean feels his heart in his throat. Cells line the walls, glass fronted and stark inside, with narrow cots and not much else. One window near the end has been shattered, clotted blood spattered on the shards of glass.

The next room along, bloody handprints coat the glass from the floor to about two feet below the ceiling, dragging. The sight turns Dean’s stomach, makes something sour and thick rise in his throat that he has to shake off before he can speak.

“That handprint look familiar to you?” he asks, turning to Sam, and his brother nods. His lips are pursed, and it’s a surefire sign that this is bothering him just as much as it is Dean.

“Shit,” Dean says, pressing the heel of his palm against his forehead. “ _Shit_. We’re too late. Fuck, he was _here_ , and--”

“Dean, wait,” Sam cuts him off, pushing lightly at his shoulder and stepping over the glass. It crackles under his shoes. “Look.”

On the floor is a small slip of paper marked with a familiar symbol. Flipping it over, he holds it up and gives it to Dean.

“ _On The Road_ , Property of Ontonagon Library,” Dean reads, and looks back at the other side where Castiel’s true name is drawn in blue pencil.

“Look at the last check out,” Sam says, and Dean flips it back over. Written in the same blue pencil is a single word:

“Alaska.”

He glances back up at Sam, whose smile is spreading.

“He left it for us,” Sam says. “He knew we were coming, and he left us a clue.”

“They’re taking them to fucking _Alaska_?”

“Apparently,” Sam says, taking the paper back and looking it over before sticking it in his pocket. “Come on, let’s see if there’s anything else before we head out.”

 

 

 

Outside in the mud and patchy snow, they find five sets of footprints leading away from the tire tracks. Three were made by bare feet: two by people in boots.

One set of large prints ends in a deep groove, like whoever had been running had fallen to their knees before being dragged back toward the truck. The second--a woman’s footprints, Dean thinks, judging by how narrow they are--make it a few feet further before the mud is churned up from a struggle. The third set, prints of someone with a foot much the same as Dean’s, disappears into the trees.

Dean holds his own boot alongside it before looking up at Sam. He tries not to get his hopes up. It could be anyone.

“Looks like we’re hiking,” Dean says.

“We should grab the regular shotgun first,” Sam says, and Dean frowns. “Could be bears.”

A little way into the trees, the trail becomes harder to track.

“You have signal?” Dean asks, digging his cell out of his pocket as he speaks, and Sam does the same.

“Yeah, it’s pretty good. You?”

“Full bars,” Looking down the slope, Dean can make out disturbed ground. “We walk ten minutes, straight line, turn back unless we see something. Deal?”

“Sounds good.”

The earth is slippery as he makes his way down the side of the hill, and soon through the trees he can hear the steady trickle of a creek. A deer, fur matted with mud along her flank, stands stock still when she hears his approach, and Dean pauses in the trees. Looking around, he can’t see any more evidence that the fleeing angel--whoever it was--came this way.

Another step has him knee deep in mud. It squelches, ice cold, and when he yanks his foot free his boot gets left behind. With a grimace he digs it out, and though it’s slightly off the dead-straight track he hobbles over toward the creek to rinse it off.

The water is icy and clear, and it’s as he crouches down beside it to splash a little onto his hot skin that he hears a loud _crack_. A flock of birds bursts from the trees on the other side of the creek, and he stands up, listening intently.

They’re miles from anything. The sound of someone grunting comes through the trees.

He dials Sam’s number automatically.

“You find something?” Sam asks him.

“Maybe,” Dean says quietly, scanning the tree line for the source of the shout.

“Don’t move,” Sam says. “I’ll be there in--”

Another noise comes through the trees, and Dean lowers his cell, stepping forward. The pebbles clack together as he starts across the creek. Faintly he can hear Sam telling him to stop through the phone, and he lifts it again to whisper;

“When you get to the bottom of the hill, go around the mud patch toward the creek. I can hear someone on the other side.”

“Dean, seriously--”

“It’s fine, Sam.”

With his phone back in his pocket, Dean pauses on the edge of the creek and listens. A low sound comes again--someone in pain--and Dean hurries forward. His gun is still at his side. He doesn’t bother to raise it.

A little further into the trees he sees him.

Slumped on the ground, dressed in thin gray hospital scrubs, a barefoot man is struggling to his feet, a fallen branch lying on the wet ground beside him. He looks up when he hears Dean approaching and shuffles nervously backward, holding one wrist close to his chest.

Carefully, Dean puts the gun on the ground and lifts his hands.

“It’s okay,” Dean tells him. “I’m not gonna hurt you.”

The man just stares, and Dean takes a moment to look at him. Tall. Kind eyes. Dark hair and brown skin.

“Are you Adaeoet?” Dean asks, and the man’s eyes widen slightly as if in recognition. He appears to wipe it from his face immediately. He shakes his head.

“I am 1-03,” he says.


	13. Adaeoet

The ground grows more rocky as the trees thin out, and the soles of his feet sting and ache where the cold earth has split the skin. Ahead of him, the man named Dean pauses, looking back with a hard set to his jaw that 1-03 is beginning to think is permanent. His face is flushed, nose pink with the cold. As he watches, Dean rubs at it with his sleeve.

“Nearly there,” Dean tells him. “You doing okay?”

Through the fog of exhaustion and the pain in his wrist, 1-03 considers himself and nods.

“My heart rate is a little high,” he offers. “Though under the circumstances, I suppose that is to be expected.”

Dean blinks at him, as though this information is not what he anticipated. He licks the corner of his lips before pursing them and nodding, angling his chin in the direction of a tree with a yellow fabric marker pinned to the trunk.

“This way,” he says.

The further they go, the thinner the trees get, and soon they’re scrambling up a steep embankment of loose shale and wet grass.

A car is waiting in the clearing beyond, long and sleek and black. Leaning against it is a man with shaggy brown hair and his arms folded across his chest. He pushes away from it with a start when they emerge, looking rapidly between 1-03 and Dean with his hand hovering over something unseen at his hip.

“Relax, Sam,” Dean tells him, lifting a palm toward him. “He’s not a demon.”

Sam lowers his hand, but his eyes stay on 1-03 for a long moment, considering before he glances back at Dean.

“Is this--” he starts, and 1-03 feels a stirring of something in the pit of his stomach. In the back of his mind, or perhaps someplace deeper, a sense of knowing struggles to grow. “It’s him, right?”

Dean looks back over at him.

“What did you say your name was?” he asks.

1-03 swallows against the temptation to repeat _Adaeoet_ and feels the name lodge somewhere in his throat.

“I do not have a name,” he says instead. “My designation is 1-03.”

“1-03?” Sam repeats. “What does that mean?”

“I was the third prisoner in group one to be introduced to the Circadia program.”

Dean lifts his hands toward Sam as though explaining something, and walks toward the car.

“We’ll figure it out when we get back to the motel,” he says, and pulls open the door.

It takes a long time to get to the motel, but when they’re inside Sam digs through his bag and hands over a collection of clothing. Soft flannel shirt and a pair of denim jeans. Thick, woolen socks. A pair of white running shoes that he looks like he doesn’t particularly want to part with.

“Go take a shower,” Sam tells him, pointing toward a bathroom at the side of the room. “Warm up. We’ll talk after, okay?”

1-03 nods and steps inside. An overhead fan starts up as soon as he switches the light on, and the sound is loud and jarring.

By the time he emerges, he can feel his hands and feet again. Sam and Dean are sitting; Dean at the small table by the window, Sam on the edge of the bed. They look up when he steps into the room.

“Better?” Sam asks him, and 1-03 nods.

“It was very cold in that tree,” he says.

Dean blinks at him slowly.

“Wait, that’s what you were doing?” he asks. “Climbing out of the tree?”

“I spent the night up there,” 1-03 says. “I thought it would be harder for them to find me. Apparently I was right.”

He looks between them, and Dean pushes out the chair on the other side of the table, gesturing for him to sit.

“Do you know where they were trying to take you?”

“Alaska,” he says. “Somewhere in Alaska. 4-01 heard them talking.”

“4-01?”

“My cellmate,” he explains. “That was his designation.”

Frowning, he looks between the two men.

“I don’t suppose one of you is the one who has been talking to him?”

“Talking to him?” Sam’s eyes widen, and he glances over at Dean.

“He told me he could hear someone talking to him. They called him by a name, said they were coming to find him. He thought that whoever it was might have been his--”

“He didn’t know my voice?” Dean cuts him off, clearly distressed, and 1-03 shakes his head.

“There’s a procedure,” 1-03 explains. “They… they call it crowning. If you break the rules, or if you remember something… well. Once they’ve done it, you don’t remember anything from before.”

“They did this to him?”

“They did it to everyone,” he says. “It’s the first thing that happens.”

Dean stares at him across the table, his gaze heavy. He doesn’t look away when he talks to Sam.

“Pass me my journal.”

Leaning across the bed, Sam picks up a leather-bound book that was dumped there and hands it over. Dean flips through the pages before spreading them wide, planting it down on the table and pushing it toward him. 1-03 stares down at the symbol before him.

 

“You recognize that?” Dean asks.

Swallowing heavily, 1-03 traces his fingertip over the shape on the page, following the loops carefully. He could do it with his eyes closed, he thinks. It’s familiar. More than familiar. It is him.

“It’s my name,” he says on a breath. “My true name.”

“Adaeoet,” Dean says, and he looks up from the book, feeling something hot in his throat at the sound. “Your name is Adaeoet.”

“My name is Adaeoet,” he agrees, and it’s as though a weight has been lifted. “They took it from me. I still don’t-- I still don’t know why.”

Letting out a shuddering breath, Adaeoet presses his hand over the page, blocking out his name.

“How were you contacting me?”

“That’s a long story,” Sam says, a nervous look on his face, and Adaeoet frowns.

“How did you know to look for me, then?” he asks.

“We met someone who saw you just before you ended up in there,” Dean tells him.

“So do you know what I did?”

“What you did?”

“I was a monster,” he says frankly. “It’s why I was there. Why we were all there. Why they crowned us. It was punishment.”

“But you don’t _remember_ what you did. How can you be punished if you can’t remember the crime?”

Adaeoet shakes his head.

“Being allowed to forget was a mercy,” he says. “That’s what they told us.”

“They were lying,” Dean says, and he sounds angry. Righteous.

“You weren’t a monster,” Sam tells him. His voice softer than Dean’s. “The de--the people who took you were monsters. You weren’t.”

“Neither is Cas,” Dean tells him.

“Cas?”

Sam clears his throat, looking over at Dean, who pushes to his feet.

“Castiel,” Sam says. “That’s... what did you say your cellmate’s designation was?”

“4-01,” Adaeoet says, and Sam nods.

“His name is Castiel.”


	14. The Shadow

Out in the hallway of the Waxwing Hotel, Dean and Sam talk in hushed tones about the angel in Sam’s room.

“We should tell him,” Dean insists.

“How?” Sam asks. “Because last time I checked, springing something like, _oh by the way, you’re an angel_ might be a little much for a guy who didn’t even know his own name until an hour ago.”

Leaning against the wall, Dean rubs at his eyes with the heel of his hand.

“What do you suggest, then?” he asks. “Alaska’s a big place, Sam. We need to figure out where they’ve taken Cas and the others, and as long as he think’s he’s just some guy, he’s only going to slow us down.”

“I don’t know. I just think that if we flat out tell him, he’s not going to believe us.”

“He accepted the fact that I’ve been talking to Cas in his own head without a problem,” Dean points out.

“That’s different,” Sam says. “He probably--”

“Wait,” Dean says, holding his hand up. “That’s it.”

“What’s what?” Sam asks.

“That’s how we’ll tell him.”

Sam frowns for a moment, and Dean waves a hand in the air.

“We pray to him.”

Widening his eyes, Sam looks down his nose at Dean as if he’s suggested they burst out of a cake.

“You think hearing voices in his head is going to freak him out _less_?”

“At least it would prove that we weren’t just making crap up. I don’t know, Sam. Maybe he’ll think we’re nuts, but what if it’s enough to make him remember?”

Dean shakes his head, looking down the hall.

“When I found Cas,” he says. “After the reservoir. Telling him was enough. We told him he was an angel, and he remembered. The instinct was still there, under everything he thought he knew.”

Sam looks unconvinced.

“It might be enough,” Dean repeats. “We’re running low on options.”

“Alright,” Sam says eventually, slumping against the wall in defeat. “Let’s give it a shot.”

It feels absurd to pray to him in the hallway, so Dean ducks back into his own room while Sam waits outside, just in case.

Sitting on the edge of his bed, Dean clears his throat and prays.

 

 

 

It’s not long before a knock comes at the door. Dean is surprised to find Sam alone behind it.

“Did he--”

“He came outside,” Sam nods, looking over toward the other room. “He’s pretty shaken up. But...”

“But?”

“He believes you. He said he heard things once or twice while he was inside. Sensed things. Felt us looking for him.”

“Where is he now?”

“Back in the room. I thought I’d go out to the car and get the books on angels. It might help jog his memory some more.”

“Yeah,” Dean says. “Good plan. Should I--”

“Give him a couple of minutes,” Sam suggests. “But maybe keep an eye on the door.”

With that, Sam takes the keys and disappears down the hall. Dean steps out of his room to stand outside the next door, hoping against hope that Adaeoet wasn’t lying when he said he believed them. Hoping that he’ll be able to tell them something that will lead them to Cas.

Only a couple of seconds pass before the door to Sam’s room opens. Adaeoet holds it wide.

“I heard you praying again,” he says in explanation, gesturing for Dean to come inside.

“I wasn’t praying,” Dean says.

“You were hoping very hard in my direction,” Adaeoet tells him, crossing the room to sit at the table. Dean closes the door. “That’s basically the same thing.”

“You’re taking it pretty well.”

Adaeoet shrugs.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

Raising his eyes, Adaeoet looks toward the ceiling light where a moth is butting against the bulb.

“I proved it to myself,” he says. The moth hits the bulb again, a soft _ting_ ringing out through the room as Adaeoet looks back at Dean. “And then I remembered.”

“What did you remember?”

“Many things,” he says simply. “Not _everything_ , I don’t think. Not yet. But I know who I am. I remember myself, and my purpose. I remember the man who used to inhabit this body.”

“Used to?”

“His name was Chanda,” Adaeoet says, a note of sad fondness in his voice. “There are certain types of damage that make it impossible for the soul to remain in the body. The first time they crowned me, he...” Adaeoet sighs, shaking his head. “Suffice it to say, Chanda has been gone for some time. I expect they damaged the vessel in that manner deliberately. It would be much more difficult for them to convince us that we were human criminals if we all had voices in our heads telling us otherwise.”

“So all the others--”

“Just the same as me, I think. Alone in their vessels and unaware that things were ever any different.”

Adaeoet smiles and looks at his hand, turning it and stretching out the fingers.

“Until a very short time ago, I believed with absolute certainty that this was the body I was born with. As it so happens, I was never even born. It’s strange to think of.”

“Yeah, I’ll bet,” Dean says. “Sorry about that.”

“It’s alright. There were things I overheard at Circadia that make a lot more sense now.”

“Like what?”

“Grace, for one thing. I heard them mention it. It’s what they were extracting from us.”

“Extracting?”

Adaeoet nods.

“They used a needle,” he says, a shadow of fear in his eyes at the memory. “Sometimes in the throat, sometimes just here--” he taps his index finger to the inner corner of his eye.

“What were they doing with it?”

“I don’t know. But by now... there were almost two dozen of us in captivity, and they extracted from us daily. If they’re hoarding it for some reason, they’ll have a lot by now.”

“Did you say _daily_? How is that possible?”

“They only took a little each time. Enough that we were weakened, but not so much that it killed us.”

The door shushes over the carpet when Sam walks back in, a heavy bag of books slung over one shoulder. He glances between them with a raised brow.

“Everything okay?”

“Not really, Sam,” Dean says, leaning back in his seat and pointing a thumb in Adaeoet’s direction. “Addy here says they’ve been extracting grace from all the angels daily.”

“What? What for?”

“That’s the sixty-four thousand dollar question.”

“The demons that had you,” Sam starts, closing the door behind himself before dumping the bag of books on the bed. “Did you hear anything about what they were planning to do with it?”

“No,” he says. “What little I do know is through sheer luck.”

For a long moment, the three of them sit in silence, and Dean wracks his brain for some way to move forward. In the end, it’s Sam who has the idea.

“Do you think--” he starts, then cuts himself off. “Never mind.”

“What?”

“No, it’s just... I was thinking. Before Cas disappeared, we’d talked about a way to track Gadreel using grace. We were planning to do it when he got back from Hastings, but...” Sam shrugs helplessly.

“How does it work?” Dean asks, frowning.

“If you have a small amount of an angel’s grace, there’s a spell you can use to locate them,” Sam says, and looks over at Adaeoet. “So do you think we might be able to do it in reverse? Locate the grace that was taken from you by using what you still have?”

“Perhaps,” he allows. “It’s worth trying.”

With a glance at his watch, Dean pushes to his feet.

“Alright, it’s almost seven, so I say we grab some food, catch a couple hours sleep, and head back to the bunker. Give this spell a shot.”

“Sounds good,” Sam says. He looks at Adaeoet. “You need to eat?”

“I think I can do without,” he says. “But I’ll admit I have grown rather fond of eating. Not the taste so much as the ritual of it, if that makes sense.”

“They fed you?”

Adaeoet nods.

“They fed us, made sure we bathed and exercised. They actually took quite good care of us. I suppose they had to so that our grace wouldn’t start healing our vessels and raise a lot of questions.”

“Huh,” Sam says with a frown, and digs his cell out of his pocket. “Then I’ll order enough for all of us.”

 

 

Lying awake in the night, Dean stares at the ceiling and argues with himself about whether or not he should pray to Castiel.

Adaeoet had said that if any of the prisoners showed signs of remembering, they’d be crowned again, and without knowing how closely Castiel is being monitored he knows it’s far too great a risk.

Still, knowing that he’s out there somewhere with no knowledge of what is truly being done to him is enough to make Dean feel sick with worry. It hovers over him like a specter, as though every breath, every moment, every shadow in the room is clamoring close, bearing down on him with the need to _do_ something. But there’s nothing to be done.

Not for the first time, he curses the fact that prayer is a one-way line.

When his cellphone’s alarm buzzes from the bedside table a little before five, he hasn’t slept a wink. The drive back to Lebanon takes almost fifteen hours. It feels like a week.

 

 

 

Back at the bunker, Sam descends into the lower levels to find the needle, and Dean leads Adaeoet into the infirmary.

As the lights come on, bathing the room in light, it occurs to him that the last person he brought in here was Castiel. It had been after they found him in Detroit, back when Gadreel was still pretending to be someone Dean could trust.

There hadn’t been any real need for it--Castiel had been completely healed by Gadreel before they’d even left the apartment building where they found him--but Dean had steered him in here anyway. Sat him down in the chair and checked him over, just in case.

His hands had been shaking. He told himself it was because he’d been awake too long. Drank too much coffee.

Truthfully, it was because he hadn’t just come close to losing Castiel; he had lost him. That he was alive again was more than Dean could handle. The entire drive from Detroit back to Lebanon, all fourteen hours, Dean found himself repeatedly checking the rearview to prove to himself that he was really there and breathing.

Now, with Adaeoet trailing behind him as he walks through the green tiled room, Dean can’t help but wonder if he’s used up all his good luck.

If maybe this time, Castiel won’t come back.

“They had a chair much like this one,” Adaeoet says, his voice startling Dean out of his thoughts. “In the room where they performed extraction.”

“We can do it somewhere else,” Dean offers, and Adaeoet looks up at him with a smile.

“That won’t be necessary.”

Still, he looks a little nervous when Sam walks in with the syringe. The spell itself is in a Men of Letter’s file, the words _On the Inner Workings of Angels_ printed in bold across the cover, and Dean skims over it as Sam slowly extracts grace from Adaeoet’s throat.

The whole process takes nearly five minutes, and Dean has read the spell through multiple times before Sam declares that they should have enough. Through the entire ordeal, Adaeoet is stiff and silent in the chair. His face is immobile, and remains so until Sam finally pulls the needle free.

“We should have most of the stuff we need in the library,” Dean says, and at the sounds of his voice Adaeoet seems to shake himself back to awareness. “I’ll head downstairs for the herbs. Meet you out there?”

Sam agrees, and Dean heads out of the room.

When he gets back to the library with his arms full of spell ingredients, Adaeoet still looks a little dazed.

“You doing okay, there?” Dean asks him as he dumps everything beside the bowl Sam has already prepared, and Adaeoet glances over at him.

“I may have underestimated the negative effect that would have on me,” he says, a note of what Dean thinks might actually be embarrassment in his voice despite the fact that the extraction has clearly affected him physically.

“It’s to be expected,” Sam says, and Adaeoet nods.

“I suppose I thought that because I know myself again it might be easier to endure,” he says.

“But it still felt like having a limb slowly pulled loose.”

Sam’s face pales a little at that, and Dean grimaces.

“It hurt that bad?”

Adaeoet nods again, swallowing visibly, before he forces out a breath.

“Let’s just hope it helps.”

 

 

 

The spell, in the end, does little more than fizzle in the bowl. As they watch, the wisp of Adaeoet’s grace curls up toward the ceiling and dissipates, and nothing else happens. Dean’s stomach feels like it’s full of lead and sinking.

For a long moment, they all stand in the library, waiting.

The silence drags on.

“Anyone got a plan B?” Sam asks eventually, and Dean glances over at him, trying to ignore the feeling of utter defeat that’s rolling in his gut.

“Perhaps I could return to Michigan,” Adaeoet suggests after a moment. “If I’m in the place where they kept us, I might be able to track the path they took with the grace they already have.”

“Could you feel it when we were there before?” Dean asks, and he shakes his head.

“I don’t know what else to try.”

Without any other ideas, they set him up with one of the backup cars they keep in the street near the bunker--a clunky but reliable Dodge Ram Prospector that’s far too time-worn for anyone to pay attention to--and Adaeoet disappears in a cloud of road dust before the sun has fully risen.


	15. Four More Walls

They’re outside, he realizes with a start, the floor of the truck rattling beneath him, and he wraps his arms around his legs for warmth. It’s cold. Colder than he thinks he’s ever been.

His throat burns, stings and aches, and he remembers trying to expel the medication. Remembers pressing his fingers into his throat before a sharp sound had come from behind him and strong hands were pulling him backward. Something sharp had pierced his neck.

They hadn’t had time to crown him after he’d expelled the pills. They’d injected him with something. A sedative.

Sitting all around him, the others are all hunched over for warmth, and he scans their faces. There’s not enough of them. Adaeoet is missing. Maybe, he thinks, he got away. He hopes so.

“How long have we been moving?” he asks 4-02, a small, elfish girl with dark eyes and coppery skin who arrived a week after he did, and she shakes her head.

“I don’t know.”

Moments later, the truck rumbles to a stop. Outside he can hear something exceptionally loud, a roar unlike any he’s ever heard. When the rear gate of the truck is pulled open he squints into the blast of icy air.

They’re on a runway, pulled up beside a bulky airplane. Godric is standing by, watching them, and a wiry man in an orange vest runs over to him. Something about the way he moves, how his mouth shapes the words he says, reminds him strangely of Sullivan. Godric nods at whatever the man says, and then they are herded out onto the tarmac and loaded into the cargo.

“Watch out on take off and landing,” the man in orange says to them before the door is closed. “This one--” bizarrely, he taps his own forehead, “won’t shut up about things sliding around. You don’t want to get crushed.”

On that note, he hops out of view, and the door mechanism whirs as it raises. Castiel hears a drill fastening it into place.

Hurriedly, they move around, trying to find someplace safe to sit or stand. It seems forever before anything happens.

Take off is rough and loud and terrifying, and Castiel just barely manages to avoid being crushed by a huge metal container.

The air feels thin and icy. His fingers numb.

Eventually, he sleeps, and only wakes when a hand shakes his shoulder roughly, dragging him to the side of the cargo bay and out of the way of shifting baggage.

“I think we’re landing,” 2-05 tells him, her green eyes watery and wide.

“Thank you,” he tells her.

They hold onto one another as they land, stopping each other from sliding out into the path of the containers. Only when they’ve stopped moving does Castiel realize 3-02 isn’t moving. He stares at her in shock.

“She didn’t wake up in time,” 2-05 whispers, her voice quivering.

Castiel pulls her more tightly to his chest.

“She was your cellmate?” he asks, and feels her nod against him. “I’m sorry.”

There’s no more time to grieve before the sound of a drill comes from outside, and they all stagger back from the opening hatch. A woman in bright yellow safety gear is the one to open it this time, and when she speaks, again Castiel is reminded of Sullivan. Her eyes settle on 3-02’s body.

“Didn’t I tell you to watch out on the landing?” she asks, shaking her head, and disappears through the hatch. “Come on, we don’t have all day. Someone carry her.”

Dazed, they follow her out onto an ice-coated tarmac, 2-05 and 2-03 carrying 3-02 carefully between them, and into another truck like the last. The wind is bitterly cold.

Once the doors are closed, the rattling journey continues for hours. When it finally stops, Castiel can smell salt air and brine. Seaweed.

He can’t feel his fingers.

Nobody opens the truck, and though the engine has stopped he can feel it swaying. It doesn’t stop.

As time drags on, the swaying grows rougher, and a few of the others become ill. The air is freezing cold and putrid with the smell of seasickness, and for hours, and then days, they wait.

When they finally stop, two more are unmoving. Castiel feels like he might never stop picturing their faces, frozen in fear.

Min is the one to open the door, and when she sees them she’s furious. For the first time, she doesn’t wait until a later time to reprimand Sully.

As they all watch on, too exhausted and cold to be horrified, Min closes her hand around Sully’s throat and lifts her clean off the ground. She throws her against the side wall of whatever boat it is that the truck is on.

“You were supposed to look after them,” she roars, her voice splitting the air, and Sully looks up at her, struggling back to her feet. “What good are they to us if they’re dead?”

“I didn’t think--” she starts, standing and making her way back toward her.

“Did she feed you?” Min demands, turning away from Sully to glare into the dark truck. “Did you have water? Blankets?”

They stand in silence, staring out into the bright, and Min takes their lack of reply as confirmation of her suspicions. She turns back to Sully.

In a flash of movement too fast to see, she has Sully by the throat again, and her voice is dangerously soft.

“Get them to the bunker,” she says. “ _Safely_. If a single one of them is in worse condition than they already are, I’ll deliver you to Godric on a fucking platter. Do you hear me?”

“Relax,” Sully says. “I’ll take care of it.”

Min just stares at her.

“I should have left you in Hell.”

The words resonate strangely, and Castiel tries in vain to grasp at the threads of memory that it exposes.

 

 

 

The cells aren’t as modern as the ones at Circadia. Instead of glass walls and thumb pads, there’s rough cement and padlocks.

It’s colder here, too. Castiel needs two blankets to keep his toes from turning blue. Alaska, he remembers. Wherever they are, it’s in Alaska.

The day after they arrive, he hears the rattle-clink of the lock being opened, and looks up to see Godric and Ikenna. He wonders where Sully is. If she’s still alive. He doesn’t bother asking.

“Let’s go,” Ikenna says.

He doesn’t need to tell Castiel what for. He disobeyed. He remembered. He tried to flee.

He’s going to be crowned again.

They only needed time to prepare.


	16. Snowblind

 

With his back to the door, 4-01 sits on the cold floor of his cell and folds a paper flower.

He isn’t sure how he knows how to do it, but the moment he finds paper under his hands, they seem to slip into the motion automatically. It’s sense memory, he thinks. Something he must have done a hundred, a thousand times before. He’s seen 1-06 doing it, sitting at the long table in the mess.

Perhaps they were both school teachers. This seems like the sort of thing someone who worked with children would learn; a simple form of art that can be produced by following instruction. He wonders how people who enjoy such a harmless pastime could become the kind of monsters they must have been to end up here, and decides that it’s better that he doesn’t know.

The paper he has is not colorful. 

Instead, his flowers are made from the pages of a book by Ernest Hemingway, and they line the wall opposite his narrow bedroll that felt strangely empty until he’d put something there.

The sound of his door being unlocked is loud, and he presses his thumb along the crease of paper, smoothing it down before setting it aside.

“Time for extraction, 4-01,” says Ikenna. There’s no need for it, though. Things here run on clockwork.

Today, his extraction is immediately followed by his two-minute shower in the frigid bathroom. From there, he makes his way into the kitchen to help prepare the evening meal for the other inmates.

“I miss the old place,” 2-05 tells him as they stand side by side in the kitchen, waiting for a pot of pasta to cook on the stovetop, and 4-01 looks over with a lifted brow. “It was warmer.”

“What do you mean?” 4-01 asks, and 2-05 tilts her head to look at him.

“Were you crowned, 4-01?”

Blinking, 4-01 considers the question for a long moment.

“Yes,” he says eventually. “Nine extractions ago.”

“That’s just after we arrived here,” 2-05 tells him quietly, stirring a large spoon through the noodles. “We were in the other place for months.”

“If it was warmer,” 4-01 says, pulling a colander out from under the counter, “I’m glad I don’t remember it. It’s cold enough here without a memory of warmth to make it seem worse.”

The sound of a sharply cleared throat stops them talking, and 4-01 looks over his shoulder to find Ikenna frowning in at them from the mess hall.

“Less talking, more cooking,” he says, voice flat and steely. “If dinner isn’t served on time you’ll both lose the privileges you’ve been granted.”

Ducking his head, 4-01 settles the colander in the sink and gets back to work. 2-05 doesn’t speak again. 4-01 isn’t certain what he has that is considered a privilege, but with his own memories beyond his grasp, he isn’t willing to risk losing a single other thing.


	17. That Old Black Magic

 

It’s been weeks since Rockland, and despite countless hours searching through Alaskan news websites, nothing resembling angelic manifestation has turned up. Bleak isn’t a strong enough word for the outlook.

It’s in the middle of the night one Tuesday in April that Dean is struck with a thought so obvious that it makes him want to kick himself for not thinking it sooner.

The door to Sam’s room swings open with a creak, thudding loud against the wall, and Dean flips on the light. In his bed, Sam jerks awake, squinting.

“Dean?” he asks blearily. “What’s going on--what are--”

“I had an idea,” Dean says, buzzing with excitement, and Sam scrunches his eyes closed and open a few times.

“Can it wait until morning?”

“I had an idea for how to find Cas,” he says, and doesn’t wait, just turns on his heel and heads back out into the library.

When Sam joins him, he’s got almost everything spread out on the table. Ground ginger, cinnamon, honey, and a disposable plastic razor from the cupboard in the bathroom. Sam stares down at it in bleary confusion.

Dean waves his hands over the spread.

“We’re gonna make some dream tea,” he says.

“How--wait, is that Cas’ razor?” Sam asks, leaning forward and picking it up. “When did he even--”

“When he, uh... when he was human. Before I had to--”

“Before Gadreel made him leave,” Sam says. “Yeah, okay.”

“So,” Dean says. “I figure, we’ll track down some dream root, I’ll hop on into Cas’ brain, and he can tell me where he is. Narrow down _Alaska_ to something we can actually use.”

“That could work, provided he’s even sleeping these days. Does he need to since he got his grace back?”

“It’s not _his_ grace,” Dean points out. “And anyway, Adaeoet said that the demons were extracting just enough grace that they were all practically human.”

“So he’s probably sleeping,” Sam agrees with a nod. “Do we still have some dream root?”

“Pretty sure we’re out,” Dean says. “Used it all up when Charlie got whammied by that djinn last year.”

“So we’ll head out in the morning and get some more,” Sam says, raising his hands defensively when Dean makes to argue about waiting that long. “Even if we leave right now, the closest supplier is like four hours away, and Cas probably won’t be sleeping by the time we can make it. We’ll go in the morning.”

Logically, Dean knows he’s right. It doesn’t make the idea of waiting any more palatable. He looks at the rest of the ingredients spread out on the table and sighs.

“Alright,” he agrees. “But we’re going early in case the guy in Missouri is out.”

“Sure thing,” Sam tells him.

“I mean _early_ ,” Dean says. “Like, five at the latest.”

“I’ll be ready. Try to get some sleep, okay?”

Dean nods, and with that, Sam heads back to bed. Dean drums his fingers over the table, thoughts running a mile a minute as he tries to remember all the different suppliers he can, just in case there’s trouble getting any from the guy in Missouri. The next closest place he knows about is almost another ten hours away in Shreveport, Louisiana. Other than that, there’s a woman in Colorado, but she’s seven hours in the other direction.

Maybe, he thinks, he can head for Missouri while Sam goes to Colorado. One of them will have some luck.

The need to pray to Cas is like an itch under his skin. He pushes past it and heads back to his room, settling down for a restless few hours.

Thankfully, the supplier in Missouri--a generally unpleasant man by the name of Hank who runs a store out of his garage and charges through the nose just because he can--has more dream root than he knows what to do with. Dean buys three times more than he needs, barely even raising a brow at the obscene figure Hank asks for, and calls Sam to tell him to head back to the bunker.

It’s late afternoon by the time they’ve both arrived, and Dean works on remembering how to remain lucid while Sam prepares the tea.

The hardest part of dreamwalking, he’s found, is becoming aware that it isn’t real. Those first few moments are crucial. Under his breath, he murmurs, _I’m dreaming, I’m dreaming, I’m dreaming_ until it becomes second nature to think it.

By the time Sam walks into his room with a steaming mug of sweet-smelling tea, Dean is ready.

“Good luck,” Sam tells him as he hands over the mug, hands hovering to catch it when the tea takes effect.

Dean pointedly ignores the hair he can see floating in it and drinks deeply. It’s only seconds before sleep overtakes him.


	18. Uninvited (But Welcome)

 

4-01 has been standing outside a strange, modern cell with gray walls and a glass front for a very long time. In his hands, he holds a paper flower that he unfolds and folds, over and over.

The action is soothing, and automatic, and he has the strangest feeling that he needs to keep doing it if he is to understand the reason he’s here. So he unfolds it again, and folds it back up, and waits for meaning to present itself.

Meaning makes no appearance, but he does hear a sound. The soft _shush_ of heavy fabric. A person walking.

When he looks, he sees a man at the far end of the long corridor. Green jacket. Bowed legs. He’s blocking the elevator. 

The man turns in place as though, like 4-01, he’d forgotten how he came to be here. At the sight of his face, 4-01 feels his breath catch in his throat.

_I know you_ , he thinks. _It’s you_.

It’s an absurd thought, given that he doesn’t know anyone, and yet... he knows this man down to his core. Knows the shape of his smile, the sound of his voice, the way it sounds when he says--

“Cas,” the man’s mouth cracks into a smile like 4-01 has never seen as he hurries to close the distance between them. “I was starting to worry it wasn’t gonna work.”

The shortened name spoken aloud hits him square in the solar plexus, makes his whole body thrum in recognition, and he crushes the paper lotus in his hands as he remembers being crowned, the long boat ride, those last moments at Circadia before he and Adaeoet had lost track of one another and he’d been sedated. 

_I forgot myself again_ , he thinks in horror. _How many times have I forgotten?_

“Are you okay?” 

The man is getting closer now, and Castiel nods, dumbstruck as he steps into his space. He can’t seem to stop staring, even when the man grabs Castiel and dragging him into a hug. 

It’s different to how Adaeoet hugged him. Tighter. Closer.

“Don’t ever--” the man says, hand tightening in Castiel’s shirt, cheek scratching against his neck. “Don’t you _ever_ do that again.”

Castiel swallows loudly.

“You’ve been looking for me.”

“Of course I have.”

“You’ve been longing for me,” he says frankly, and the man pulls back suddenly, his cheeks growing pink. It’s lovely, Castiel thinks. The echo of some deeply buried memory tells him it’s one of his favorite things, to see this man bashful.

“I, uh,” the man rubs the back of his neck and clears his throat. “Let’s not make this any more awkward than it has to be, Cas. I’m already inside your head.”

“You are?”

“African dream-root,” he says, a note of pride in his voice that makes Castiel smile. “Used some hair from the razor you left in our bathroom. It was pretty gross, not gonna lie. But, y’know… the spell worked. Worth it.”

“You’re visiting my dream through magic?” Castiel asks, and the man smiles again.

“How the tables have turned,” looking around, he sticks his hands in his pockets. “Not exactly what I expected your dreams to look like, though.”

“What were you expecting?”

“I dunno. Gardens? Flowers? Maybe some small fuzzy animals? Not...” the man gestures vaguely around them before meeting his eye. “God, this place looks just as bleak as it does in reality. We must have just missed you, Cas. I’m sorry.”

The repeated use of his name when this man’s still escapes him makes Castiel feel guilty and off-balance, and though he hates the thought of upsetting someone with whom he’s somehow certain he shares a close relationship, he can’t help but ask.

“What’s your name?”

The man’s expression falters, pain evident in every line in his face. His throat works uselessly a couple of times before he answers. Castiel wishes he could take back the question, sooth the hurt.

“Dean,” he says eventually. “My name’s Dean. You don’t--”

“Dean,” Castiel repeats. “I know I know you, but...”

“They’ve done something to you,” Dean says with a sigh. “Made you forget. Shit, I knew that-- I just. I kinda forgot as soon as I saw you.”

“The people here told me--they said I was a monster. That I’d done terrible things, and that I should be thankful that I don’t remember them,” he hesitates, looking at Dean thoughtfully. “That’s not entirely true, though, is it?”

“It’s not true at all,” Dean tells him, earnest. “I promise you, you’re the furthest thing from a monster. We’ve all made some mistakes but we never-- you’ve never wanted to hurt anyone. You always tried to make up for it if you did.”

His gaze is searching, like he’s trying to make sure his words have been heard.

“I believe you,” Castiel tells him. And it’s true--he does. He trusts this man. Trusts Dean. It feels like the most natural thing in the world to trust Dean. The familiarity of his eyes, the tender way he looks at Castiel--it makes him wonder again, as he did weeks ago, if the longing he’s felt in his heart is tied up in his connection to the man who’s been searching for him.

His thumb rubs over that line on his ring finger again, and he glances down at it. 

“May I ask you something, Dean?”

“Sure,” Dean says.

“Did I... were you and I,” he sighs, shaking his head. “I apologize if this upsets you, but I can’t remember, and I’d like to remember.” 

“What, Cas?”

“Since I’ve been here, and before at Circadia, I’ve missed someone terribly. I’ve… ached for their presence, their voice, their touch, and I think... I remember I felt a similar longing when you spoke to me,” he looks at Dean, watching as his cheeks grow a lovely shade of scarlet. “And again when you arrived here. It’s so strong I barely know what to do with it, and it feels right. As though being together is natural for us.”

“Together,” Dean repeats, and Castiel lifts one hand to touch his fingers to Dean’s throat, where his pulse is visibly racing.

Feeling his heart race beneath his fingers makes Castiel’s own heart thud in recognition, and he flattens his palm against Dean’s chest.

“It feels right,” Castiel repeats, searching Dean’s eyes and finding hope and love and profound sadness in them. “It feels _true_. Like when I remembered my name. I know I am Castiel, and I know that I’m in love with you.”

Dean takes a sharp breath.

“I just wish I could remember,” Castiel says.

“We, um. We weren’t... that. You and I. We’ve never--”

Castiel flushes and steps back, and Dean catches his elbow. The motion seems to surprise even him, and he stares down at his fingers where they’re holding Castiel in a loose grip.

“But,” Dean says, and pauses, seeming to swallow about ten different words before he manages to speak. “But, I mean. It’s something I’ve, um... me, too, you know? I just never…”

“Oh,” Castiel smiles.

“Yeah,” Dean exhales, and shakes his head, apprehension suddenly taking over his features, as though he’s afraid he’s said too much. He drops Castiel’s arm and steps back. “Shit. What am I-- Cas, you don’t even _remember_ me. You barely remember yourself.”

Dean covers his face with his hands.

“You remember,” Castiel tells him, pulling his hands away. “So tell me something. Maybe it will remind me.”

“Like what?”

“How we met,” Castiel suggests, and Dean laughs, his eyes bright. “What?”

“Cas, I don’t know if that’s a good starting off point.”

“Oh.”

“You saved me,” Dean says after a moment.

“I did?”

“Yeah,” Dean says with a smile. “So I guess it’s my turn, now.”

Castiel is about to reply when the walls come down. The lights come on at seven. He wakes.


	19. Never Enough

 

Dean sucks in a breath, jerking up from the bed, and it takes a moment for him to understand why his heart is racing. Sam is staring down at him from the nearby chair, an expectant look on his face.

“Did you--” he starts, and cuts himself off immediately when Dean lets out a sound that he will deny until his dying day. “Shit, Dean, are you-- what’s--”

From behind his hands, Dean drags in a few wet breaths and silently thanks his brother for not actually saying that he can see he’s crying.

“I found him,” he manages. “Fuck, Sam, I found him.”

“Dean, that’s awesome,” Sam says, and Dean can tell he’s beaming even without looking. He nods, feeling his nose run, and sniffs before pulling his hands away to wipe his face clean on his sleeve. Sam pulls a face. Dean ignores it.

“Yeah,” he says. “He’s alive.”

It’s not until the words are out of his mouth that he realizes how scared he was that Castiel might not be, and he rubs his hands over his face again.

“Where is he?” Sam asks, and at that Dean slumps a little.

“I don’t know, I was about to-- I was just about to ask him, and I guess he woke up. I didn’t get to ask.”

“You were under for hours,” Sam says.

“Took a while to find him,” Dean admits. “And he didn’t... at first he didn’t know me. Not really.”

Sam frowns.

“I thought Adaeoet said Cas had heard you praying before,” Sam says, and Dean shakes his head.

“I guess they... they must have wiped his memory again. I haven’t been praying since we found Adaeoet in case they noticed him listening. I didn’t want to draw attention to him.”

Sam nods, and Dean lets out another heavy breath.

“But it’s okay,” he says. “I’ll just... tonight, I’ll do it again. I’ll ask where he is tonight.”

At that, Sam grimaces.

“What?” Dean asks, worried.

“We don’t have any more hair,” Sam says, and Dean’s stomach drops. “There was hardly any in the razor. We can’t make any more dream tea.”


	20. Memento

 

Once the first memories have taken root, it doesn’t take long for others to begin to surface.

Castiel keeps his mouth shut about them. The crown is a constant threat, and so, with practiced calm, he goes about his days quietly and doesn’t let on that he’s beginning to know himself.

Things come slowly but steadily, and he learns the signs of a nearby memory.

Learns to identify the threads that just need a little pull to unravel, and he picks at them in his mind, pulling and tugging until they fall, scatter for him to pick up and recall.

Thankfully, the big memory comes while he’s alone, as he lays on his thin mattress pretending to read.

His book is open, and he’s staring right through it, thinking about the extraction chair, and about crowning, and why they always seem so familiar. So viscerally frightening in a way that has less to do with what happens here and more to do with something else. Something from before.

It all comes tumbling down at once.

Heaven. Naomi. His memory wiped, over and over. 

Purgatory, like Dean had said in his dream, and most importantly, most importantly by far, _himself_. Castiel, shield of God. Angel of the Lord. Messenger of heaven. Guardian of Thursday and one of the rulers of Jupiter and--

He can hardly breathe.

Gasping, he sits up and feels everything flood through him at once. From the first moment of his awakening, millennia ago, to the moment when Metatron cut his true grace from his throat and sent him to Earth. He remembers stealing the grace of another. Remembers pulling Dean from Hell and tearing down the wall in Sam’s mind. Remembers the mess with April, with Gadreel, with everything.

Remembers, finally, being taken by surprise by two demons in a grocery store parking lot outside Hastings, Nebraska.

Finally, _finally_ , he understands extraction. Understands what they are taking from him.

“Grace,” he murmurs, his heart pounding hard in his chest. “They’re extracting our grace.”

The others are all angels, he realizes. And their wardens, their captors, are demons.

Siphoning their grace slowly, just a little each day and leaving enough that it grows back, replenishes like blood in a human body.

Keeping them healthy enough that their grace is not wasted on healing them.

Keeping them subdued and human enough that they don’t realize what is happening to them. Preying on their innate need to repent, to atone for transgressions, whether or not they are real or imaginary.

He feels as though his eyes are truly open for the first time in months, and when he hears the sound of the lock on his door being opened, he prepares himself for what is on the other side.

Min opens the door, and he suddenly sees her in two layers. One is the face he’s come to know; a pointed chin and clever brown eyes under a black crop of artfully styled hair. The other is a twisted thing. Horned and snarling. Suddenly, he understands why looking at the wardens directly always left his head aching.

He does not react.

“Time for extraction,” she tells him, and for now, he follows.

In the back of his mind, he resolves to find out as much as he can so that next time Dean dreamwalks, he’ll be able to tell him where he is. And in the meantime, he’ll keep quiet. Follow the rules.

Stay under the radar and avoid, above all else, being crowned again.


	21. Ghosts

 

For days, Dean is listless. He moves through the bunker aimlessly, stopping in front of the bookshelves and staring at them blankly until Sam speaks to him and snaps him out of his own head.

He can’t help but feel as though he’s failed.

Castiel, wherever he is, is waiting for him. Dean wants to pray to him, to apologize for not asking the important question until it was too late, but he can’t find the words. His guilt bears down on him, weighted and bitter.

Research feels pointless, but it’s all he’s got. All the books in the bunker are beginning to look the same.

It’s as he’s sitting in the library for the third day in a row, eyes stinging as he reads the same useless texts he’s already red six times before, that Sam walks in with his coat on and the keys to the Impala in his hand.

“Where are you going?” Dean asks him, his eyes falling on the duffel Sam has slung over his shoulder.

“Jody called,” Sam says, a familiar twist to his mouth when he says her name. Dean remembers it from the last time they saw her. He wishes he had the energy to tease him for the obvious crush. “Said there’s a vampire up in Sioux Falls. I told her I’d come help out.”

Dean doesn’t even get all the way to his feet before Sam waves him off.

“We’ll be fine,” Sam tells him. “Honestly, you’re too distracted to hunt right now.”

Dean narrows his eyes, and Sam lifts his hands defensively.

“Seriously,” he says. “Jody could probably take care of it on her own. You should stay here, keep digging. You’re bound to find something useful.”

Before he knows it, Sam is gone. The silence in the bunker is overwhelming.

He reads for hours, and only stops when the letters start swimming in front of his eyes. Coffee helps. Whiskey in his coffee helps more.

It’s almost four in the morning before he quits for the day, and when he sleeps it’s restless and shallow. He tosses and turns, waking himself repeatedly, and gives up before eight o’clock, dragging himself out of bed and putting another pot of coffee on.

He spends the entire day reading again, breaking only when Sam calls to let him know how things are going in Sioux Falls, and it goes on in the same manner for another two restless nights.

With all the books on angels thoroughly exhausted, their pages dog-eared just from his own repeated study, he heads down into the basement where they moved the books on lesser magic. There weren’t many of them in the bunker, but there were five or six volumes that were the 1940’s equivalent of the crap they peddle in the new-age section of chain book stores; nothing but hokey spells for making yourself more popular or winning the lottery.

He carries them all upstairs and dumps them on the table, and barely even registers half the words he’s reading because they’re useless. Until he gets to the fourth entry in _Modern Magicks_.

A spell to find a lost love.

He’s still staring at it when Sam gets home, so exhausted that he doesn’t even hear him until he’s right beside him, leaning over his shoulder to read the book. Dean slams it shut.

“No luck?” Sam asks, and Dean clears his throat, blinking as he looks up at Sam.

“No,” he says. It feels like a lie. “How’d it go?”

“That’s a long story,” Sam says. “Have you eaten?”

Dean thinks about it for a moment, and his stomach growls. He shakes his head. Sam frowns at him.

“Have you eaten since I left?” he amends.

“Of course I have,” Dean says.

“Coffee doesn’t count.”

Rolling his eyes, Dean pushes to his feet and heads for the kitchen.

Sam has been home for six hours, sitting opposite him at the library table and leafing through one of the books he’d picked up while he was in Sioux Falls--Jody might have a small collection of occult texts, but what little she does own was given to her by Bobby before he died, and if there was ever a person whose library contained something outside the Men of Letter’s collection, it was Bobby Singer.

Despite having his own new book to search through, Dean can’t quite pull his mind away from the spell he already found.

Every useless ritual he finds just makes him more and more certain that he’s not going to find anything else, and every fruitless minute that passes has him feeling sicker to his stomach.

It’s edging on midnight when he realizes how fucked up it is that he’s just sitting here when they could be doing something. How selfish he’s being.

He’s angry when he grabs the other book and slams it open, and Sam flinches at the sound.

“Jesus, Dean,” he says, staring across the table. “What’s the problem?”

Dean jabs a finger at the spell silently, and with a frown, Sam reaches across the table to pull the book toward himself, smoothing the pages down. Dean can’t remember being this anxious in his entire life. Silently, he tells himself to grow the hell up.

“You thinking we could modify it to find a lost friend?” Sam asks eventually, and Dean feels like there’s a stone lodged in his throat. “Take out the angelica root and substitute in--”

“No.”

Furrowing his brow, Sam looks back down at the page, and Dean wonders why his brother chose this of all moments to be slow on the uptake.

“But this is--”

“Sam. I’m not interested in making a whole big thing of this, so just... listen,” he starts, and shifts his gaze to the table where his fingers are twitching against the scratched grain. “Cas and me. We’re not... we aren’t friends.”

Sam pulls a face.

“Since when aren’t you--”

“No, wait. I mean,” Dean stumbles over his sentences, feeling his face heat up, his stomach tense, his hands grow clammy. “We’re friends, but we’re... he’s, y’know. Got feelings. About me.”

Getting the words out feels like pulling teeth, only harder. Like he’s trying to do it with his bare hands.

“ _For_ me,” he amends, and even though he’s not looking, he can tell Sam’s eyes widen.

“Dean, are you--”

“And it’s not-- it isn’t just him, okay?” he forces out. “So. That’s that. Do you remember seeing any obsidian in the storage room? We need it for step two.”

“Dean--”

“No, Sam. We’re gonna try this spell, and you’re not gonna say a damn word about what... about what I just said, or what it means, or _any_ of it. We clear?”

Sam doesn’t reply right away, and Dean chances a glance up at him. He wishes he hadn’t. Sam is staring at him with a hard look in his eye. A stubborn look; the one he got from their dad. John Winchester is the last person Dean wants to think of right now.

“No,” Sam says.

“ _No_?“ Dean’s nerves flare. “The hell do you mean, _no_?”

Something like fight or flight seems to kick in, and Dean’s hands curl into fists on the table even as he thinks he’d like to run. To his credit, Sam seems to notice pretty quick. He schools his features into something softer immediately.

“I just mean,” Sam sighs, shaking his head. “Dean. You know I’m not going to force you to talk about this if you don’t want to talk about it. But I’m not going to pretend you didn’t basically just come ou--”

“Don’t, Sam,” Dean says.

“I can’t pretend I don’t know,” Sam says. “How long have you--”

“Sam--”

“Why didn’t you ever say anything?” Sam asks, genuine distress in his voice, then holds up his hand with a shake of his head. “Never mind, I know exactly why you didn’t say anything.”

“See?” Dean says. “Not hard to follow.”

Sam just stares at him sadly.

“Jesus,” he breathes. “After everything we’ve been through, you honestly thought you couldn’t tell me? What did you think I was going to say?”

“Come on, Sam--”

“I can practically see Dad’s fingerprints all over this,” Sam goes on, and Dean is on his feet before he’s even made the conscious decision to stand. “Did he find out? Did he--”

The rest is inaudible through the door.

The air outside isn’t any lighter.

With nothing but the breeze to keep him company, Dean stands in the road outside the bunker and breathes.

He’s shaking, adrenaline overloading his system. Despite knowing that there have been far greater battles in his life than a relatively painless admission of something he’s not even sure he’s hidden that well, he can’t help but feel like he’s won something. Bested some adversary that existed nowhere but his own mind.

Back in the bunker, he knows Sam is probably fretting about whether or not to follow him or give him space, and he can’t help but replay the last few minutes over and over in his head.

On the one hand, Dean knows he’s overreacting.

On the other, he’s kind of pissed, because Sam’s got no idea what it took for him to say as much as he did.

When he finally goes back inside, it’s only because he knows standing out here isn’t solving anything. It sure as hell isn’t getting them any closer to finding Cas.

Sam is sitting at the table where Dean left him, the book spread open under his hands, and he doesn’t speak. Just watches Dean warily, a guilty look on his face as Dean walks down the stairs.

Stopping at the edge of the room, Dean clears his throat.

“So,” he starts, and is surprised by how hoarse his voice sounds. “I, uh...”

“I’m sorry,” Sam cuts in. “I shouldn’t have brought up Dad.”

“Yeah, well you weren’t exactly wrong,” Dean offers with a shrug, and Sam shakes his head.

“Doesn’t matter. Still shouldn’t have said it.”

Chewing on the inside of his cheek, Dean half nods, and Sam sighs.

“I just... I hope you know that I don’t... I’m not like him, okay? I don’t care. And I’m glad you told me, even if it was through the medium of angry yelling.”

“Fuck off,” Dean says with something approaching humor, and Sam snorts.

“Yeah, okay,” he laughs. “Moment’s over. But... can I just ask one thing?”

With a tired sigh, Dean shakes his head, staring at the ceiling before closing his eyes. He tenses his jaw.

“You can ask. Doesn’t mean I’m gonna answer.”

“When did it happen?”

Looking back at him, Dean scrunches up his nose.

“When did what happen?”

“When did you two--” Sam says, waving his hand vaguely in the air. “Y’know. Get together. Was it Purgatory? It was Purgatory, right?”

Dean stares at him.

“We, uh. No. No, it wasn’t Purgatory.”

“Then when?”

“Technically,” Dean starts, and slumps down into the chair he’d abandoned before. “Technically, we uh... haven’t.”

Sam squints at him for a long moment. Dean covers his face.

“Dreamwalking,” he mutters into his hands, the words muffled enough that Sam asks him to repeat himself, and when he does Sam only looks baffled.

“You said he didn’t recognise you,” Sam says.

“He didn’t at first,” Dean says. “But he, uh... let something slip, I guess. And I was asleep, so I wasn’t as, y’know...”

“Defensive?” Sam supplies, and looks sheepish when Dean glares at him. “Sorry.”

“Anyway. We said some stuff. So when we’ve found him, when this is all sorted out... I’m probably still not gonna want to talk about it. But him and me, we’ve... things are probably gonna be different. And I’m not planning to hide it.”

“Good,” Sam says. Dean lifts his brow.

“Good?”

“Yeah, Dean. Did you think I’d want you to?”

“Honestly? I don’t know.”

“Look, I know that this conversation already has you on the verge of hitting something, so I’m not gonna drag it out. But listen. If you’re happy--if you’re both happy--then _I’m_ happy. You’re my brother. He’s practically family. If this is what you both want then I’m thrilled for you, okay?”

“Calm down Sam, we’re not even… I mean, we’ve barely even talked about it. He might not want--”

“He will.”

“How would you know? You didn’t even know anything until I told you.”

“Maybe I didn’t put it together,” Sam says. “But I have eyes, and I’ve been around you both long enough to recognize that what you have between you isn’t just some fleeting thing. Maybe it’ll take some time to figure out, considering how uptight you both are--”

“We aren’t uptight.”

“--but you’ll work it out. I’d put money on it.”

It shouldn’t come as a shock that the spell is crap, but it still stings when the candle’s flame gutters out and dies without so much as a whisper of mystic energy.

Sam’s insistence that they’ll find another way sounds less convincing than ever, and Dean spends the following few hours searching for the answer in the bottom of a bottle of Jack.

To absolutely no-one’s surprise, it’s not there, either.


	22. An Overdue Break

 

It’s with an abrupt and dizzy start that Dean wakes up in the early morning a few days later. There’s a fuzzy, sour taste in his mouth. He pulls a face, grimacing as he grabs the nearest bottle to wash it away. Warm beer from two days ago, it turns out, doesn’t help.

It takes a lot longer than he’d like to admit to figure out that the pounding he hears isn’t just in his head.

It’s not exactly rhythmic, but it’s certainly percussive. Loud. _Thud_. Like someone kicking the bunker’s main door.

He’s on his way up the stairs in moments, not even pausing to tell Sam because suddenly, he’s convinced that the spell worked after all. Certain that he’ll open the door and find Castiel on the other side. That it just took a little while for him to get here.

When he yanks it open, though, his hope crumbles.

Standing on the stoop, his face splattered in blood that’s running slowly down into the immaculately pressed collar of his suit, is Crowley. In his hands, he’s awkwardly holding a metal box. As Dean stares out at him he drops it to the ground with a heavy thunk.

“There,” he says flatly, and pulls a handkerchief from his breast pocket to wipe his hands and face clean. Dean stares down at the box, then up at Crowley. It’s too goddamn early for this. He’s not actually sure what time it is, but it’s definitely too early. And he’s too hungover.

“What’s--”

“Abaddon,” Crowley says. He kicks the box. From inside, Dean hears a dull, muffled grunt. “Ding dong, the bitch is dead. Or, you know,” he shrugs. “Close enough.”

“You killed Abaddon.”

“Someone had to,” he says. “And you two have been bloody useless. But it’s taken care of. Her body has already been dunked in cement and built into the foundations of an outhouse in the second circle of Hell--”

“There’s outhouses in Hell now?”

“--and her head’s in that box. Do what you want with it. Stuff it and hang it from the mantle if you like. Spruce up the place. Add to the serial-killer-chic you’ve no doubt got going on.”

“Why are you giving me this?”

Bizarrely, Dean’s still-not-quite-sober brain decides to point out to him that this is like when cats bring their owners the corpses of birds they’ve caught, like they’re looking for praise.

“Nobody on Earth can easily sneak into Hell,” Crowley points out before Dean can chase that particular train of thought any further, “and nobody from Hell can easily get into your little clubhouse. With half here and half there, chances of some Knight-of-Hell groupie putting humpty dumpty back together are slim to none.”

“Oh,” Dean says, looking down at the box. “Okay. Thanks?”

Crowley looks startled at the gratitude, and Dean clears his throat, crossing his arms.

“Is that all?”

“Yes, that’s-- oh, wait,” Crowley pauses, patting down his coat pockets until he finally uncovers the location of another box. It’s small and wooden, the kind with a sliding lid that people used to keep pencils in in the sixties. He hands it over. Dean slides it open.

“What’s thi-- _eugh_ ,” sharply, he snaps it closed and looks at Crowley in disgust. “ _Seriously_?”

“She wouldn’t stop talking,” Crowley says with a shrug.

Dean tries to ignore the sound of the wet tongue flapping around in the wooden box and presses his eyes closed.

“Please tell me you’re leaving now.”

“Forget I was ever here,” Crowley says, backing away from the door. “I’m heading back to Hell, and I’m staying there. I’ve had it with you Winchesters and the constant stream of crap you bring down on my head, so from now on you keep out of my business and I’ll keep out of yours. Deal?”

“As long as I don’t have to kiss you,” Dean says, and sticks out a hand. Crowley shakes it firmly.

“You should be so lucky.”

Funnily enough, it’s Abaddon’s head that reminds him, and for the second time in recent memory, he wakes Sam by slamming open his bedroom door. His poor brother is going to have a heart attack one of these days.

“Jesus, Dean, what is it?”

Sam all but stumbles out of bed, clutching at the lamp on his bedside table as it nearly topples over the edge.

“Feathers,” Dean says with a manic edge to his voice, still clutching the box with Abbadon’s head in it. He never made it to the basement. Sam just stares at him, blinking.

“What? What’s in the box?”

“Abaddon’s head,” Dean says, and ignores Sam’s startled look to get back to the important topic. “Remember when she chased Henry through that... wormhole or whatever, and he stole those feathers from us?”

Visibly shaking himself, Sam drags his eyes away from the box and looks fully at Dean.

“Yeah?”

“They were _Cas’ feathers_ ,” Dean says, grinning.

“Right,” Sam says, blinking rapidly, cogs turning in his head as he catches up. “You’re thinking...”

“Dream tea, Sammy. Henry gave the feathers back when we caught up with him, remember? I can use them to make more dream tea, and I can give asking Cas where he is another shot.”

Sam barely looks awake, but he’s yanking open his chest of drawers anyway, pulling out a pair of jeans.

“They’re in the old storage unit, right?” Sam asks. “We didn’t have the bunker yet.”

“Long drive to Buffalo,” Dean says. Sam’s already pulling on his shoes. Dean’s halfway to the garage before he’s got the first laced up.


	23. First It Giveth

 

For ten days, Castiel has known himself.

Moving through the frigid halls of the Alaskan bunker, he meets the eyes of the other prisoners and sees them clearly. Sees their true faces where before he saw only human ones and a vague, fuzzy, headache-inducing blur around the edges.

He is simultaneously relieved and saddened to see no human souls remain within the angel’s vessels. The demons are another story.

Sullivan and Ikenna still carry the original owners of their bodies with them, and though they’re damaged they do not appear beyond repair. Min and Godric, from what he can tell, have had possession of these particular bodies for long enough that the souls have been burnt out completely. It pains him to look at any of them.

Continuing to call the angels by their designations when he can now recognize their true names is difficult, but the risk of being overheard addressing them directly is too great.

What’s more, the vast majority of them are unlikely to receive him well even if they do remember.

Baradiel, Aloai, Odatt, Aaira, and Bataivah, angels he had known as designation 2-03, 3-04, 3-03, 3-05, and 2-06 respectively, were all once followers of Raphael. Though their continued survival is proof that they switched to Castiel’s side eventually, for the most part, he suspects they only did so in the hopes that he would spare them. With his inflated powers gone, and with a host of new mistakes and disasters to add to the list, he does not expect that their loyalty will hold.

2-05, on the other hand, was not one of Raphael’s followers, but she did work for Naomi. Castiel fights the part of himself that feels some twisted sense of justice at the knowledge that an angel who spent millennia pulling memories from his brothers and sisters has wound up in the same predicament herself. It’s a spiteful, human feeling. Castiel is ashamed of it.

Still, he knows that Zedekiel probably holds some resentment for him, considering how often he needed to be reprogrammed, and discounts the idea of going to her before it can fully form.

The only angel that he knows once liked him is 1-06. Before, Zabo had been a creative and quick-witted angel who served beside him under Anna, and she had been on his side from the beginning of the civil war. Now, she is the occupant of the cell beside his, and spends most of her time decorating the bleak walls with paper flowers and quietly humming to herself.

Though she was of a lower choir of angels than he was and their paths did not cross often, he knows that her loyalties have always been aligned with their true purpose; to protect humanity.

His brief stint as a would-be God may have destroyed any trust she once placed in him, but he suspects that she will understand if he explains the whole story.

It is possible that the remaining four angels, Glma, Pado, Raguel, and Levanael, could share Zabo’s probable views, but Castiel has nothing on which to base the thought. If he weren’t in such a dire situation and unable to escape if they turned on him, he might be inclined to approach them anyway.

As it is, though, he’s weakened--practically human from the constant extraction of his grace--and trapped. If it came down to it, he’s not entirely certain that he would survive a fight.

The deaths of the angels that were lost on the journey here are proof enough that it would not take much to kill him in his current state, so it is only when he finds Zabo alone, twelve days after Dean visited his dream, that he makes an attempt.

Today, the two of them along with Baradiel and Raguel have been put to work pulling up the

mildew-stained carpet in the newly appointed library room and scrubbing down the walls.

Unlike the old facility, which was sterile and modern in every way, the building here is run down.

In multiple rooms there are bricked-over sections of wall that look like they were windows until very recently, and it isn’t difficult to guess that the water-damaged interior ended up that way due to long-term abandonment and broken glass.

The few rooms with carpet reek of damp and mold, so it wasn’t entirely surprising when Min announced during their last evening meal that the prisoners would be responsible for cleaning the place up.

Crouching beside Zabo as she fills a bucket with soapy water, Castiel looks over his shoulder to make sure the others are out of ear shot before he speaks quietly.

“May I ask you something, 1-06?” he asks, scrubbing at what appears to be a decades-old piece of graffiti of the words _Kilroy was here_ as he does.

Raising her head, she looks toward him with wide brown eyes.

“What is it?”

Before he has a chance to ask, Raguel’s measured footsteps move toward them, and Castiel tenses his jaw.

“Can I come by your cell this evening before lights out?” he whispers. “It’s private.”

She frowns a little, and he adds;

“It won’t take long.”

After a moment of consideration, she nods, and he thanks her as he stands, turning to face Raguel.

“Would you help me move the book shelf?” she asks.

“Of course, 4-04,” he says, and follows her across the room.

The process of clearing out the few pieces of furniture and tearing up the carpet is a slow one, and by the time they’ve put everything back--sorting the few books they have by topic--it’s almost time for Castiel’s extraction.

He waits behind Zedekiel in the hallway outside the extraction room, and listens quietly to the increasingly inappropriate conversation in the short line behind him while trying not to smile. It’s difficult; the two angels speaking are Glma, whose principal role as an angel was to preside over sexuality and sensuality, and Akriel, who was concerned with fertility. Their frank discussion about the merits of a hot shower when it comes to pleasuring oneself is more graphic and detailed than Castiel ever needed to hear. Zedekiel adds her own thoughts on the matter after a while, leaning around Castiel to do so, and he can’t help the thought that Dean would be in stitches if he were here.

His train of thought, unsurprisingly, derails as soon as Dean climbs aboard.

For the first two days after Dean visited his dream, Castiel had not quite realized the weight of his own confession. Once his memories returned, though, the knowledge that he not only told Dean of his own feelings but learned they were reciprocated has been difficult to avoid thinking of.

With everything that is happening, he knows that wistful romantic thoughts should be the last thing on his mind, and yet every night as he lays down to sleep he finds his mind drifting there anyway. Indulging in fantasy is not something he has done particularly often--only once or twice while he was human and living in Rexford did he let himself imagine what might have been--but now that he knows that there is a chance things might actually be different when he escapes this place, it’s a little harder to put off.

He’s still daydreaming when he feels a prod in his shoulder, and looks back to find Glma lifting his brow.

“2-05 has gone in,” he says, and Castiel looks back to see that he is now at the front of the line. He shuffles forward dutifully, making space at the end of the line for Zabo, who clears her throat.

“Who is it today?”

“Ikenna,” Glma supplies, and Zabo nods once, looking up and down the hallway before she leans toward them all and drops her voice into a whisper.

“Have any of you seen what’s in room seven?”

With a quick glance at the others, all of whom look as perplexed by the question as he is, Castiel shakes his head.

“I don’t know that I’ve even seen a room marked room seven,” he admits, and beside him, Glma nods.

“It’s at the other end, on the other side of the mess hall,” Zabo says.

“We aren’t supposed to go that way,” Akriel says, sounding scandalized, and Zabo meets her eyes to reply.

“I got turned around on my way here, and Sullivan was coming out as I--”

Before she can finish speaking, the familiar click of Min’s heels echoes down the hall, and Zabo widens her eyes before standing up as straight, her back against the wall. Min does not slow as she passes them; merely knocks twice on the door to the extraction room, and enters without waiting.

Through the closed door Castiel can hear the muffled sound of her speaking with Ikenna, and after a moment the door opens. Min eyes them all.

“4-01 will have the last extraction today,” she says, her cold gaze settling on Zabo. “Everyone else, return to your cells.”

Without any further explanation, she looks sharply at the waiting angels and doesn’t leave until they’ve walked back toward the cells. Castiel watches them all go with worry coiling in his gut.

He doesn’t have long to think about it before the door to the extraction room swings open and Zedekiel shuffles out, one hand on the wall as she lurches back toward her cell.

Ikenna holds the door wide.

“Hurry up, 4-01,” he says.

Despite wanting to drag his feet, Castiel complies.

The chair here is different to the one at the old place. Older like the building itself, and showing signs of wear on the faux-leather seat cover. He settles into it as best he can and leans his head back to stare out through the only remaining window in the entire place--high on the wall above the sink, only six or so inches tall but stretching almost two feet wide. Through it, he can see sky, overcast and bright, and creeping into the side of the window, the silhouette of a bird’s nest constructed from mud and grass.

He stares out at it while he sits in the chair. Keeps staring as the needle makes its initial puncture through his skin. As the excruciating pain of his grace being taken radiates through him.

The clouds are moving slowly, and flying against them he can see a bird. It circles against the cloud, closer and closer, and he watches it for what feels like forever until suddenly it lands on the narrow window ledge by the nest, its wings flapping out behind it.

At the sound of its flapping against the glass, Ikenna turns his head sharply, making the needle pull painfully in Castiel’s throat. His startled cry scares the bird away.

Ikenna returns to the task in silence, and Castiel closes his eyes.

Zabo’s cell is standing open when Castiel goes to see her, and when he looks inside all evidence of her presence is gone. The flowers that decorated her walls have been torn down.

It seems colder when he steps inside, but he can tell the sensation is all in his head as he inspects the cell for some evidence of what happened. There’s nothing.

The lazy drag of Sullivan’s footsteps is loud as she approaches, and though Castiel tries to sneak back out of the room before she passes, she still catches him leaving.

“What are you doing, 4-01?”

“I was looking for 1-06,” he says, and casts around quickly for some good reason he would have needed to speak to her. “She promised to give me the book she was reading when she was done with it.”

“1-06 will be gone for the foreseeable future,” Sullivan tells him.

Pushing down the feeling of dread that’s threatening to overtake him, Castiel nods and decides to try his luck--of all of the demons, Sullivan is the obvious weak link. If anyone is going to let something slip, it’s her.

“What does that mean?”

“It means she broke the rules, and now she’s being punished,” Sullivan says, and Castiel inwardly slumps at his dashed hopes. “If you’re not in your cell by lights out you can join her. Move it, 4-01.”

The next time he sees her, Zabo is slouching in a chair in the mess hall, staring. A long line of drool hangs from her lower lip as Baradiel carefully spoons oatmeal into her mouth.

Whatever she saw was enough for them to crown her within an inch of her life, and yet she’s still here.

They still need her. It makes Castiel sick, and he resolves to use his extraction free day to find out what it was. To find some way out that won’t result in them all being killed or given a fate as bleak as Zabo’s.


	24. Feathers

 

Thanks to a jack-knifed eighteen-wheeler on the interstate, it’s almost twenty-four hours of non-stop driving before they arrive at Castle Storage in Buffalo.

Even after all the years that have passed since he was last here, the lock-up still holds the spectre of John Winchester, his ghost lingering in every corner--or it would if the place wasn’t warded in every way they know how.

There’s a reason Dean doesn’t like to come here too often. Difficult memories.

The feathers they came for are in a warded iron box on the shelf by the back wall, gathering dust. Dean opens it as soon as he can and unfolds the cloth they’re wrapped in, checking to make sure they’re still there. Three gray-tipped white feathers, each about the length of his thumb.

“What time is it?” Dean asks, touching his index finger to the tip of one and trying to imagine what the wings truly look like when Castiel isn’t projecting shadow or manifesting single feathers that he explained were more symbolic than any kind of true physical approximation of his being.

As always, Dean doubts his imagination does him any justice.

“A little after six,” Sam says, checking his watch.

Nodding, Dean closes the box.

“Then we’ve got a lot of time to kill. You want to inventory this place? See what’s worth bringing back to the bunker?”

“Sure,” Sam agrees, and together they begin the slow process of sorting through the shelves.

It’s the middle of the afternoon by the time they’re done; the back of the Impala overloaded with weapons and books and talismans, and in one case, a somewhat ominous box marked _do not open_. That, they stick inside a larger curse box and bury it at the bottom of the trunk. Better to have whatever it is under lock and key in the bunker than to leave it here where someone could potentially break in and open it.

Heading for the nearest motel--a dingy little place opposite a Tim Horton’s called the Black Rock Motor Inn--Dean checks the clock on the dash for the fifth time in an hour and ignores the sad-eyed expression Sam is aiming at him from the passenger seat.

He’s been restless all day, his knee bouncing constantly whenever he’s found himself stationary for too long, and though he knows there’s no point making the tea as soon as they’ve checked in--he can’t exactly dreamwalk in Castiel’s head if the guy isn’t sleeping, and unless things have changed drastically since Adaeoet was imprisoned, lights won’t go out until ten o’clock--the idea of just waiting in a motel room when Castiel has been trapped for more than three months feels awful.

Like Dean’s condemning him to more suffering through inaction.

“There’s gotta be something else we can do,” he says shortly after they’ve arrived, and Sam looks over at him from where he’s sat down on his own bed to read something on his laptop.

“You know what you’re gonna ask him?” he says after a minute, and Dean shrugs.

“I figured ‘ _where are you?_ ’ would be a good jumping off point.”

Sam huffs out a laugh.

“Right, but... if he doesn’t actually know where he is--which is entirely possible if the new place is anything like the old one--you’ll have to get other details. So...”

“Yeah,” Dean agrees, pushing to his feet and heading for the table where he’s left his journal laying open. “Alright.”

“How about you get started on that, and I’ll go pick us up some food?”

“Not hungry,” Dean says.

Sam just looks at him. “I know you’re worried, but you—” he starts, and Dean lifts his hand to stop him.

“Fine. Just get me a burger or something.”

“Thank you,” Sam says. He’s out the door before Dean can respond.

 

When it’s finally late enough, Dean boils a mug full of water in the microwave and stirs in the ground-up mixture of dream root and herbs. After a long moment of consideration, he grabs a pair of scissors from their first aid kit and trims down one of the feathers, letting the wisps float down into the tea.

Briskly, he stirs the tea and pulls a face when the feathery fluff floats right back to the top. Dean stares down at it, something like doubt in his gut at a sudden and unwelcome thought.

“Do you think--” he starts, looking up at his brother, who lifts his brow, waiting for him to go on.

“I’m just thinking... the feathers aren’t a part of his human body. Do you think it’ll still work?”

Chewing the inside of his cheek in thought, Sam eventually raises one shoulder.

“The feathers are basically a physical manifestation of the light or whatever that makes up his wings, right?” he says, and Dean confirms with a nod. “Well, I mean... that’s probably like if we had a physical manifestation of part of a soul. It might not be his human body, but it’s him, and I’m pretty sure dreams are more of a soul thing than a body thing, so...”

“Good point,” he says, stirring the tea again and willing himself to believe that it will work. He wrinkles his nose at the pungent smell that rises with the steam. “I wish dream root didn’t taste like armpits, though.”

“Yeah, I don’t envy you a whole lot.”

Settling onto his bed, Dean puts the mug down on the bedside table and leans back against his pillow, giving the short list of questions a once over while the tea steeps. He raises the page, showing it to Sam.

“Anything you think I should add?”

Reaching for the list, Sam takes it and reads it over before grabbing a pen and scratching out something at the bottom. When he hands it back, his messy scrawl says; _pucker up, angelcake_.

“Seriously?” Scowling, Dean looks up at his brother, who is giggling to himself like he thinks he’s hilarious. “If I wasn’t on a time limit I’d kick your ass.”

“Sure you would,” Sam grins, picking up the mug and holding it out. “Sweet dreams.”

“You’re an asshole,” Dean replies, but he takes the mug all the same, settling more comfortably against his pillow before finally drinking it down.

Dream tea tastes disgusting on a good day, but this batch is somehow even worse, considering the texture of the feathers as they pass over his tongue. He tries not to gag. Thankfully he only has to deal with the flavor for a few seconds before the tea knocks him out.

 

 

Soon enough he finds himself wandering along a vast beach.

The surf is loud beside him; the sky open and dark, spotted with more stars than he thinks he’s ever seen.

“Dean,” the voice comes from behind him, and he turns to find Castiel standing barefoot in the water, his gray hospital scrubs damp to the knee. He tilts his head a little to the side. Dean’s heart stutters at the sight. “Tell me--are you in my head, or are you in my head?”

Dean grins. He couldn’t help it if he tried.

“It’s really me,” he says, moving closer. “How about you? Are you--”

“I’m okay,” Castiel confirms, walking through the shallow water to meet him at the shore. “I’ve remembered myself. It all came back to me not long after the last time we spoke.”

Coming to a stop a few short feet away, Castiel looks at him carefully.

“I’m sorry if I made things awkward,” he adds.

“Hey, don’t be,” Clearing his throat, Dean takes a half step closer, unable to stop himself from asking. “Was all that-- what you said last time--”

“It holds true,” Castiel says. “It has for quite some time.”

“You never said anything.”

“Neither did you.”

“Yeah, well... I’m not exactly the poster boy for self-awareness,” Dean points out, and Castiel smiles at him. The sight makes Dean ache. He bites back his own smile and tries to focus. “So, uh... I know it’s a long shot, but do you have any idea where you are?”

Castiel’s expression is pained.

“Alaska,” he offers, shrugging helplessly. “Beyond that... all I know is that it took a flight and a very long boat ride to get here. We’re either somewhere on the coast, or on an island. More likely an island or I expect we would have travelled by truck.”

“Did you see the outside of the building?”

“No,” he says. “We arrived late at night, and the truck that transferred us from the boat to the building pulled right up to the door. The best I can tell you is that there are at least two floors, the lower is underground. A lot of the upper floor had water damage when we got here, and there was some writing on a couple of the walls that looked quite old.”

“What writing?”

“One just said _Kilroy was here_ ,” he says, frowning. “Another was a name and date, scratched into the tile in the bathroom. _Jack Robertson, OK - August ‘43_.” He shrugs. “Other than that... most of the windows on the upper floor have been bricked over, so I’m not sure what’s nearby.”

“Most?” Dean asks, lifting his brow, and Castiel nods.

“There’s one small window in the... the room where they take our grace,” he falters a little, studying Dean’s face. “I didn’t tell you about that yet, did I?”

“Adaeoet filled us in,” Dean tells him, and Castiel’s eyes widen. “We found him in Rockland.”

“He’s okay?”

“Yeah,” Dean says. “We helped him to remember who he was, and... he’s helping us now. Trying to track you and the others down.”

“When we arrived here and he was one of the angels that was missing, I worried he’d been killed.”

“How many angels are there now?”

“Twelve,” Castiel tells him. “Before we were brought here, there were nineteen.”

“What happened?”

“One was crushed during the flight,” Castiel tells him. “The demons had us in the cargo hold of the plane, and 3-02... I don’t know her true name, but the luggage containers were sliding around, and she didn’t move quickly enough. Two others froze on the boat. As for the rest... I don’t know. Adaeoet and I had planned to attempt an escape, so perhaps he had persuaded some of them to do the same.”

As they talk they move a little further up the beach, and Dean sinks down to sit on the sand. Castiel sits beside him, knees bent with his elbows resting on them as he looks out at the rolling waves.

“How could any of that kill them?” Dean asks, and Castiel looks over at him sadly.

“The demons have been taking more grace every day,” he says simply. “As soon as it’s replenished, it gets removed again. We’re all basically human at this point. We have to eat and sleep and everything else. It’s the main reason I haven’t tried to fight back since I remembered myself--I know I’d be killed before I get anywhere.”

“Shit,” Dean mutters, rubbing his hand over his face. “Alright. Well, you said there was a window. Can you see anything outside that might help? Buildings, street signs, anything like that?”

“No,” Castiel says. “It’s only a few inches high, and because of where it is on the wall you can’t see anything other than sky through it. But-- now that I’m thinking of it, I did see a bird.”

“What kind of bird?”

“Some kind of gull,” Castiel says, and shifts to lean back on his elbows as he looks up. “I’m unfamiliar with all the names of the different sub-species, but it looked like that.”

Dean follows his gaze and sees a bird a little smaller than a seagull. It has a white breast and a short, yellow bill, with wide, dark gray wings. When it swoops down to land before them he sees its legs are a bright orange. Castiel glances back at Dean.

“Does that help?”

“I don’t know yet,” Dean admits. “But it’s better than nothing.”

Castiel smiles.

“Perhaps... if you give me a few days I can keep looking for something more useful. Do you think you’ll be able to make more dream tea?”

“I have enough for two more batches,” Dean tells him. “Would two days be enough?”

“Make it three,” Castiel says after a moment’s consideration. “Some days are more difficult than others.”

Dean nods.

“Sorry it took so long this time, by the way. It took forever to find something else to use for the dream tea.”

“What did you use?”

“One of those feathers you gave us,” he says, and suppresses a shudder when he recalls the texture. “No offense, Cas, but you taste kinda funky.”

“I’ll endeavor to taste better in the future,” Castiel says wryly, and Dean feels his cheeks growing hot.

Castiel’s eyes widen as he realizes what he’s said, and his mouth twists into an embarrassed smile he appears to be fighting.

“Shit,” Dean says with a laugh. He rubs at his face. “You know what I mean.”

When Castiel looks back at him, he’s stopped fighting the smile. His expression is warm and open.

“It’s very good to see you, Dean,” he says.

“You too, Cas.”

Beside him on the sand, Castiel's hand is splayed out, and Dean gives in. He rests his own hand beside it and lets the edges of their fingers bump together. Castiel doesn't pull away. When Dean risks a glance he sees Castiel looking out over the water, a slight upward curve to his lips, and when he hooks his pinkie over Castiel's, winding them together, he sees the smile grow.

They stay like that, watching the waves and each other, and when Dean finally wakes he holds onto the feeling of calm. Finding Castiel might still be difficult, but it feels a lot less hopeless than before.

He lets the unfamiliar optimism carry him out of bed and across the street, picking up coffee and breakfast before Sam has even woken up. Soon, he tells himself, they’ll find him. Soon, he’ll be ordering three coffees again.


	25. The Light That Bleeds

 

The morning after Dean’s visit, Castiel wakes with a smile. 

As brief as it was, seeing Dean was a soothing balm, and for the few minutes it takes him to walk to the bathroom and take his place in the line, he remembers the way Dean’s skin had felt when it touched him. How warm his fingers had been.

The memory has him buoyant and hopeful, and he does his best to keep the feelings from showing on his face lest one of the demons notices and sends him to be crowned. With all the times he’s had his memory toyed with, scrubbed by disciples of heaven and denizens of hell alike, he doesn’t think he could handle it again.

Naturally, the thought leads him back to what happened to Zabo, and it’s almost enough to drown out the good feeling completely. As he bathes, he thinks over his plan to find out what she saw in room seven. 

The room is above ground, located on the upper level of the building at the end deemed off limits for prisoners, and though there are no gates or locked doors between that end of the hallway and the mess hall, there is a low, humming sense of dread that comes over him whenever he’s stepped too close, compelling him on a subconscious level to walk in the opposite direction.

He assumes Zabo only made it as far as she did down the hall because that same sense of dread builds naturally on any walk to the extraction room, and if that’s where she’d been heading the feeling would have been easy to ignore when the alternative was disobeying and being crowned for it. The irony of the situation is not lost on him. It still makes him feel ill.

By the time he’s dried off and dressed, he’s got his movements planned out. Then, it’s just a matter of waiting until the morning meal has finished. 

After that, he knows that Sullivan is on the patrol between the bathroom and the cells until the first batch of extractions is complete at midday, when she will assist Min in moving the grace from the extraction room. Ikenna will be in the mess hall, supervising clean up from breakfast, in the gym right after, and then back at the mess hall to begin preparations for lunch.

Sullivan’s generally slow gait means that she usually makes her last appearance in the hallway by the cells around eleven in the morning, which gives him an hour to make his way upstairs and down the hall to room seven before anyone will notice he’s missing.

It’s a good thing, he thinks as he puts his plan into action, that the demons have convinced themselves that their method of controlling the angels is infallible. It makes sneaking through the hallways a whole lot easier.

The sense of foreboding kicks in as soon as he passes the mess hall, and grows steadily the further he goes. When he rounds the corner, walking briskly, he feels it build to a fever pitch in his chest. It’s a relief when he sees the door with a bold white seven printed above the lock, standing opposite another door marked MAINTENANCE.

From the outside, room seven looks no different to any other, and when Castiel leans toward it, pressing his ear to the wood, he can’t hear a thing. Can’t feel a thing.

Warding, he thinks, and spreads his fingertips against the door, trying to pull some kind of sense out the sigils that must be drawn into the walls on the other side. Nothing comes.

Unsurprisingly, the door is locked when he tries the handle, and he backs up, looking around for anything else that might hold answers. 

He tries to walk further up the hall, and feels the sense of dread crawling deeper into his bones the further he goes, compelling him to turn around. He ignores it, pushing onward, until he is stopped in his tracks by a sigil scratched into the floor that he physically cannot pass. 

When he looks more closely, he sees that the walls and floors are lined with them from this point on, and knows that this must be the way out. Short of bringing the whole building down, he has no way of breaking the sigils. No way of escaping.

It’s as he’s heading back the way he’d come that he hears Min and Sullivan approaching, and he ducks into the maintenance closet, carefully pushing the door closed behind him.

Through the door, he hears the wheel of one of the metal carts from the extraction room squeaking as they come. Their voices are quiet, but he holds his breath to listen, ducking down and pressing one eye to the grate at the bottom.

“...out of space,” he hears Sullivan finish, and Min sighs.

“Do you have any ideas?”

Their feet finally move into view, coming to a stop in front of room seven, and Castiel watches as Min taps her toe impatiently, waiting for Sullivan to unearth a keys as she speaks.

“How about one of those old weapons bunkers?” Sullivan says.

“Past North Lake?”

“No, not that far. There’s one about a mile away, and there’s nothing but wilderness and water on the other side. If anyone even wanted to get to it from the town they’d have to go right through our wards, but like... there’s nothing there,” there’s a jingle when Sullivan finds her keys, and Min steps aside to let her unlock the door. “I doubt anyone would even try.”

Castiel hears the click of the lock on room seven’s door, and Min says, “I’ll look into it.”

He barely even hears her. With his heart pounding in his chest, he stares out through the grate at the light spilling out of room seven. Blue-white and familiar, and so bright it’s almost blinding. It must be all of the grace, he realizes. Every last bit of it that they’ve extracted. It’s all here. They haven’t used any of it.

Whatever they’re planning, they’ve got more grace than he knows how to fathom. More power than an archangel.

It’s a relief when the door shuts.

Finally allowing himself to take a deep breath, Castiel stands up straight, running over the conversation. Wherever they are it’s remote, has multiple bunkers, and most importantly, he has a name. _North Lake_. He files the information away for Dean’s next dreamwalking session.

Quickly, before they can emerge again, he slips back out into the hallway and hurries back to the mess hall.

Ikenna eyes him with suspicion when he darts inside.

“What are you doing here, 4-01?” he asks, and Castiel shrinks in on himself in an effort to appear as innocent as possible.

“I need to use the bathroom, but the door is locked and Sullivan isn’t there,” he explains, and is relieved when Ikenna buys it.

“She’s running an errand,” he says. “Back to your cell, 4-01. You’ll have to wait until she gets back.”

Without another word, Castiel dips his head and leaves the room, heading back toward the cells.


	26. Rissa Brevirostris

 

Sam is in the bathroom when Dean gets back, and when he emerges to find coffee and breakfast waiting for him, he raises his brow.

“How’d it go?” he asks, but he’s already smiling, so Dean figures his own good mood must be visible.

“Good. Really good,” he says, and Sam’s smile turns into an actual grin as he dumps his bathroom bag onto his unmade bed. “I mean... he doesn’t know where he is exactly, but he gave me some stuff we can work with.”

Sitting down opposite Dean at the table, Sam gestures toward the notepad he’s been jotting things down on.

“Can I see?”

“Here,” Dean says, handing it over before shoving the last bite of his breakfast burrito into his mouth and speaking through it. “I’m gonna take a shower before we go.”

When he comes back out, Sam is in full research mode on his laptop.

“I knew that Kilroy thing sounded familiar,” he says, and Dean snorts as he drops into the opposite seat to pull his boots on.

“Dude, it sounded familiar because it’s the name of a Styx album,” he says, and Sam narrows his eyes. “ _Dōmo arigatō, Mr. Roboto_.”

“I hate that song,” Sam says, scrunching up his nose. “Anyway, I don’t think it was left there by some Styx fan. During World War Two, there was this... trend, I guess, where Allied soldiers would leave this slogan, _Kilroy was here_ , on walls and stuff wherever they were stationed or encamped.”

“So this other one,” Dean says, tapping on the notepad. “Jack Robertson, Oklahoma. He was probably a soldier, right?”

“That’s what I’m thinking.”

“Well if he’s still around, we can find out where he was stationed in August, ’43--”

“Looking now,” Sam says, clicking a few times before typing in the name and the state, and Dean stands up, rounding the table to read over his shoulder. “Looks like Jack Robertson is a pretty popular name in Oklahoma.”

“I’ll say,” Dean says. “Can you specify a date range?”

“Already did,” Sam says, tapping his fingernail against a box at the top of the screen that also has _military_ listed as a search parameter. There are still almost five thousand results.

“Alright,” Dean says, and claps him on the shoulder. “I guess you’ve got some reading to do while I’m driving.”

“What am I looking for?”

“Anyone with records that mention Alaska, I guess,” Dean says, and Sam sighs, pushing to his feet.

For the first few hours, Sam sits in the passenger seat with his laptop propped up on his knees, reading through every detail he can find. Dean leaves the radio on with the volume down, and presses his foot a little closer to the floor than he probably should.

“Getting anywhere?” Dean eventually asks as they pass the signs for Cleveland, and Sam shakes his head, his lips pursed in concentration as he flicks between the list of names and the website where he’s checking through military records.

“A lot of them have sealed records,” he says. “None have mentioned being stationed in Alaska yet, but I’ve only looked at about three hundred so far.”

The wifi connection starts getting patchy soon after, and stays that way until the laptop battery finally gives up the ghost at the border of Indiana and Illinois.

Sitting in a booth at a hot-dog place that stands opposite a public pool in Joliet, Illinois, they take their time eating while it charges.

“I can’t believe there’s still more than three thousand people to check,” Sam says, wiping ketchup off his fingers before he picks up his bottled water.

“So there weren’t any?”

“There was _one_ that mentioned Alaska,” Sam says, taking a drink. “But it said he was stationed Elmendorf Airfield, which is a few miles inland from Anchorage, so it’s not likely.”

“That’s assuming they landed in Anchorage though,” Dean suggests, but it sounds weak even to him. “Maybe they flew someplace else and that’s why they had to take the boat?”

“The only other major Alaskan airports are in Juneau and Fairbanks,” Sam counters. “Fairbanks is too far inland to even consider.”

“Juneau’s right on the water though,” Dean says. “All the cruise ships go there.”

At Sam’s questioning look, Dean shrugs.

“Late night TV has a lot of cruise ads,” he says, and Sam screws the lid back on to his water bottle.

“It’s possible I guess.”

“So let’s not rule that one out just yet,” Dean says, and stands as he drains the last of his coke. “You good to take the next stretch?”

“Yeah,” Sam says, ducking under the table to pull out his power cord while Dean digs through his wallet to pay for their lunch.

Within a few minutes, they’re back in the car, and Dean opens the laptop to pick up where Sam left off. The low battery warning pops up almost right away.

“Ugh,” Dean says, closing it again. “Remind me to hustle a couple of grand soon so we can get a new computer.”

“The tablet’s in the glove compartment,” Sam says.

Dean forces himself not to complain about the tablet being difficult to operate and pulls it out, tapping the screen with increasing force until Sam reaches across without taking his eyes off the road and presses a button on the side. The screen lights up immediately. Dean does not acknowledge it.

Opening up a search window, he types in _Alaskan bird, orange legs, yellow beak, gray wings_ and is presented with countless results, none of which are right. He scrolls through them, tapping his toe restlessly against the floor.

Eventually, he gives up on finding the bird and instead runs a search on all military stations that were active in Alaska during WWII.

Within a few hours, he’s got a list. Yakutat, Amchitka Island, Sitka, Caines Head, Shemya Island, Fort Randall, Umnak Island, Adak Island, Rugged Island, Cape Chiniak, St George Island, St Paul Island and Kodiak Island stand out the most due to the boat ride, but they’re all remote places, and traveling to any on a hunch is going to take a lot more time and money than they have.

He goes through all the information he can find over and over until he can rule out a couple--the base on Shemya Island is being used as an airport now, as is the one on Kodiak--but the list remaining is still too long.

He needs more information to narrow it down.

Still, he keeps reading until his eyes sting from staring at the screen, only stopping when they take a short break in Des Moines to gas up the Impala and use the Gas n’ Sip bathroom. Sam insists that he’s fine to keep driving, and Dean returns to the passenger seat to keep reading up on Alaskan military history.

Long after the tablet’s battery has depleted, Dean sees the sign for Lincoln, Nebraska in the dim twilight and reaches out to tap Sam’s arm.

“Take the exit,” he says through a yawn. “I want to stop by the library.”

“What’s wrong with the library at the bunker?”

Ordinarily, Sam would have a point--when it comes to the occult, bunker’s library is possibly the best in the country. Birds, however, are not a topic the Men of Letters ever considered worth reading about.

“If I can figure out what the bird was it might help narrow things down,” he says, and Sam nods as he changes lanes.

There’s a whole shelf of books on birds at the library, and Dean pulls out as many as he can carry, dumping them all on the table they’ve commandeered in a well-lit area. Sam sits down beside him, and every time he finds a bird that even loosely fits the description Dean gave him, he lifts the book to show him.

After twenty minutes, Dean has seen more birds than he ever wanted to, and none are the right one.

He’s exhausted, and all that hope he’d felt this morning has faded to nearly nothing until he flips another page of The Alaskan Bird-watcher’s Field Guide and there it is. Orange legs, yellow beak, gray wings.

“ _Red-legged kittiwake_ ,” Dean reads aloud, his voice startling Sam in the quiet room. He taps the picture with his index finger. “That’s it. That’s the bird Cas saw.”

Twisting in his seat to look, Sam frowns.

“I thought you said it had orange legs?”

“Well they look orange to me,” Dean says, turning the page a little so Sam can see the picture before he turns it back to read what it says. Scanning the page, he finds the subtitle describing its habitat and just about punches the air when he sees it listed as having a very limited range.

“The Pribilof Islands, Bogoslof Island and Buldir Island,” he reads, and looks back at Sam, gesturing toward the atlas he’s got on the other side of the table. “Wanna look those up?”

Sam is looking through the index before Dean’s even finished asking. The page he flicks back to has more water than land, and tracing his finger down the map, he grins. Dean can’t help but read into it. His stomach flips.

“What?” he asks, and Sam pushes the book toward him, pointing out two small islands in the Bering Sea.

Between them, a marker identifies them as the Pribilof Islands. On closer inspection, though, the reason for Sam’s smile is clear. The northenmost island is St Paul; the southern is St George.

“There were bases on both of those,” Dean says, feeling his own mouth turning up in a hopeful grin, and just as Sam is about to reply a librarian comes around to let them know the library is closing.

They’re back on the road by half-past eight.

Dean’s still grinning when they get back to the bunker at eleven.

With the laptop plugged in to the wall in the kitchen, Dean fights off his nerves and navigates to Expedia while Sam’s busy coaxing ice cubes out of their tray and into two tumblers.

“So,” Sam says after a few minutes, sitting down opposite him and sliding a glass across the table. “Have you given any thought to how we’re going to get there?”

“I’m booking us flights to Anchorage,” Dean says, ignoring the raised brows he receives in response and taking a big gulp of whiskey. “Can’t exactly drive through Canada without passports.”

“And from there?”

“We’ll fly from Anchorage to St Paul, then from there to St George if we need to.”

Sam studies him for a moment, and Dean looks at his watch. He clears his throat.

“So, uh... Check in at Kansas City International is about sixteen hours from now,” he says, and tosses back the rest of his drink before he stands. “We should get some sleep.”


	27. What Has Been Seen

 

In the eight years that have passed since Dean was last on a plane, he’s managed to convince himself that his fear of flying isn’t that bad.

He’s been through a lot since then, after all.

He’s broken bones. He’s been tortured. He’s lost countless people he’s considered family, had his guts ripped out by hellhounds and has been, quite literally, through Hell.

Spending eight hours in a cushioned chair watching old episodes of Dr Sexy on a tiny LCD screen and drinking tiny bottles of Johnny Walker should be a cakewalk in comparison.

Despite all logic, though, the second he steers the Impala onto the exit marked KCI Airport off US-71, he feels his hands growing clammy on the steering wheel.

By the time he’s parked in the long term parking lot, his legs feel a little wobbly. He can sense Sam’s concerned expression without even looking at him.

“Shut up,” he says preemptively.

“I didn’t say anything,” Sam says back, and Dean just looks at him with narrowed eyes.

“Keep it that way.”

The process of checking in goes less than smoothly--his barely-concealed panic make the TSA agents suspicious, and he finds himself subjected to a random search that makes him relieved he didn’t put his usual weapons in place this morning--but miraculously, they still make it onto the plane on time.

As the flight attendant checks his ticket and directs him toward the back left of the plane, he shifts his carry-on bag on his shoulder and tries for a friendly smile.

“How soon will the drinks cart be coming around?”

The attendant smiles back at him.

“Not until we’ve leveled out,” he says, holding his hand out to take the next passenger’s ticket. “So about forty-five minutes after we take off.”

Dean tries not to let his disappointment show, and follows Sam toward the back of the plane.

“Probably a stupid question,” Sam starts as he shoves his bag into the overhead locker and takes Dean’s to do the same, “but do you want the window seat?”

Dean just blinks at him until Sam rolls his eyes and slides over into 27-F.

Due to some no-show passengers whose luggage has to be taken back out of the baggage hold, they take off nearly an hour behind schedule. By the time the drinks cart finally comes around, Dean’s fingernails have left little half-moon shapes in his palms and he’s eaten every last one of the so called travel-calm chew candies Sam handed him wordlessly at the airport. He’s no longer certain if his stomach is rolling from nerves or an over-consumption of gelatin.

He spends the remaining seven hours of the flight counting his own breaths through his nose and not paying attention to the in-flight entertainment enough to follow the storylines, and when the seatbelt sign dings to tell them it’s time to prepare for landing (as if anyone in their right mind would even unbuckle it in the first place) he digs his nails into the armrest to give his hands a break.

The landing is rough, the whole plane shaking in a not-remotely-comforting way as they descend through heavy cloud. Dean is dizzy when they touch down. It isn’t until Sam prods his arm and says “Dude, breathe,” that he realizes why.

Their luggage is the last to come out on the baggage carousel, and for the first time Dean is grateful that they have to wait until tomorrow to fly to St Paul--at least they don’t have to run through the unfamiliar terminal to check in on their next flight, and they’ll have time in the morning to go over their cover story for their presence on the remote island.

Thanks to the different time zone, it’s only half past nine in the evening when they leave the airport. When they check in to the disgustingly overpriced airport-adjacent motel it only takes a few minutes for Dean to fall asleep despite the sun still being high in the sky.

Naturally, this means he wakes obscenely early. It’s not even 4am according to the clock on his bedside table, and Sam is still snoring on the other side of the room, but Dean is wide awake. He can tell within seconds of waking that sleeping again isn’t likely, and after laying in the dark for a few minutes he finds himself wanting to break his self-imposed no prayers rule.

He slips out of bed quietly, pulling on his jacket and boots over his track pants and t-shirt, and ducks out into the cold.

Over thirty years spent criss-crossing the country, Dean has never been this far north. Even though it’s the middle of the year, it’s cold enough in the parking lot that his fingers feel numb.

Then again, that might just be nerves.

The lot outside is rainslick and shiny, bright lights reflecting off the black asphalt, and Dean walks across it until he reaches a little bench under a rickety gazebo.

The bench is cold even through his track pants, and he regrets not putting actual clothes on before coming outside. His breath forms clouds while he sits there, and after a few long moments just sitting in the quiet, he folds his hands in his lap and closes his eyes.

“Hey Cas,” he murmurs, rubbing his thumb along the side of his other hand. “I uh, I hope this gets through. Not really sure how this works if you’re sleeping, but--” He pauses, chewing his lip, and feels a wave of guilt when it occurs to him that it might actually have woken him up. “Sorry if I woke you. Shit. I didn’t think of that before. Sorry.”

He opens his eyes, looking around the parking lot when a gust of wind sends a discarded can rattling up onto the pavement.

“I just wanted to let you know that we’re getting close,” he goes on. “We’ve narrowed the search down, so hopefully we’ll find you soon. Anyway. I, um... I just wanted to check in, I guess. Hope you’re doing okay. I’ll mix up some more dream tea tomorrow night, so I’ll see you then anyway.”

There are more words waiting to be said, clawing at the back of his throat, but he forces them to stay put. A lot of things he wants to say to Castiel are too hard to put into words; a lot more are too much to allow himself to say at all. The thought of any of them spilling out now, when Castiel isn’t even here to respond to them, is absurd.

Over the motel roof, he watches as the sun slowly bleaches the sky. It’s not quite five when he pushes back to his feet and heads inside.

A little before eight, Dean’s cell starts ringing, and he answers just as they’re walking into the motel office to return their keys. The woman on the other end introduces herself as Nadine, a representative of Pen Air, and apologizes before telling him that today’s flight to St Paul has been cancelled due to poor visibility.

Once he ends the call, having confirmed that the next flight is the following day at the same time, he and Sam pay for another night at the motel and return to their room.

Flopping back onto his bed, Dean squeezes the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger.

“I guess this is why they took a boat,” he says.

Sam makes a sound of agreement as he sits down on the other bed and turns on his tablet.

“I’ll email the inn on the island and let them know we’ll be a day later,” he says, and after a few minutes Dean gets back up to find the laptop. If they’re going to be stuck here another night, he might as well use the extra time to read up on the island they’re heading to.

The more he reads, the more he realizes that their cover story of hunting game isn’t going to go over too well.

“Sam?” he says after an hour or so reading up on the history of the island. “We need to rethink this.”

“Rethink what?”

“The only big game on the island is reindeer,” he says, pulling a face, “and apparently the locals aren’t too trusting when it comes to outsiders as it is. I don’t think they’re going to take too kindly to a couple of guys turning up and talking about shooting Bambi’s mom.”

Putting down his tablet, Sam pushes his hair back from his face and frowns.

“What are you thinking, then?”

“Says here most of the tourism on the island is bird watchers,” Dean says, and twists in his seat to look at the time. “It’s not even noon yet. We should head into the nearest town, find a pawn shop and get a couple of cameras.”

Sam snorts.

“You have a few grand to spare?”

“They don’t have to be functional cameras,” Dean points out. “I just think if we look the part, they’ll trust us enough to talk. So... y’know. Cameras.”

He shrugs, and after a moment Sam nods.

“Alright,” he says, and reaches for his cell. “I’ll call us a cab.”

The first pawn shop Sam’s google search turns up is a place called O’Brien’s Swap-n-Save, and it’s halfway down a dingy street between a liquor store and a gas station.

As they’re about to walk inside, Dean points out a sticker on the door.

“Check it out,” he says, and Sam leans over to look before grinning at his brother.

“What are the odds?”

“Pretty damn low, I’d say.”

The bell over the door jingles when they step into the tidy shop, a long glass-topped counter running around the entire place in a shape like a horseshoe. Behind it, a woman sits reading, her long, black hair graying at the temples, and at the sound of the bell she looks up from her book.

“Afternoon,” she greets them with a smile, putting the book down and looking from Dean to Sam.

“How can I help you fellas?”

“We’re looking for a couple of cameras,” Dean says, and she nods as she rolls her wheelchair back a little, turning in place and gesturing for them to follow her toward the corner.

“Vinnie!” she calls out just as a ruddy-cheeked man emerges from a back room, the beaded curtain clacking noisily as he steps through it. “Hon, you want to grab the key to the camera cabinet?”

“Sure thing,” he says, and leans back out of sight for a moment before handing the key to her, tugging his frayed ball cap down over his thinning ginger hair as he makes his way over to the counter where she’d been reading.

“Now we’ve got a few kinds,” she says as she unlocks the cabinet. “You looking for a point-and-shoot or an SLR? I’m afraid they’re all film cameras except this one--” she points toward a fairly new-looking digital camera near the front, “but they’re all in working order.”

“Actually, we just want something that looks the part. Big lens like the digital one, but it doesn’t matter if it works or not.”

Frowning, the woman clicks her teeth together.

“You putting on a play or somethin’?” she asks, and Vinnie steps a little nearer to them, his eyes narrowed.

“Or something,” Dean says, and pulls down his collar a little to show his tattoo. The woman’s eyes widen a little.

“You’re hunters?” Vinnie asks, and Dean nods. He sticks out his hand over the counter.

“Dean,” he says, then points his thumb back at Sam. “This is my brother, Sam.”

“Vince,” he replies, his grip firm.

“Emily,” the woman says, shaking Dean’s hand before Sam’s. “Don’t think I’ve seen either of you around here before.”

“Well, we’re a long way from home.”

“Where’s home?”

“Kansas.”

Vince whistles low, sticking his hands into his pockets and leaning back against the counter.

“What brings you so far north?”

“A friend of ours,” Sam explains. “Demons took him a couple months back, and we’ve tracked them up here.”

“A couple of months?” Emily asks, her mouth turning down a little as she looks over at Vince with an expression that says these poor fools. “Boys, I’m sorry to tell you he’s probably long gone.”

“He’s not,” Dean tells her with certainty, and Vince narrows his eyes.

“How can you be sure?”

“Dreamroot,” Dean says. “Spoke to him just a couple nights ago, and he’s still kicking.”

Nodding, Emily wheels herself back over toward the edge of the counter where she’d been before and pulls at a box underneath. It rattles, and she lightly slaps at Vince’s hand when he tries to help her pull it out. He makes the face of a long-suffering spouse being denied the chance to help someone too stubborn to accept it, and returns to his place leaning against the counter.

“There’s a few busted cameras in here,” Emily says, finally getting the box free and opening it up.

“Mostly I’ve just been selling ‘em for spare parts and to artists who use them in sculptures. You’re using them for a cover story, I’m guessing?”

“Yeah,” Dean says, crouching down to look through the box. “We’re heading out to St Paul Island. It’s pretty small, so we figured we’d blend in better if we acted like the rest of their tourists.”

“St Paul,” Emily says with a frown, then looks up at Vince. “Don’t we know someone out there?”

Vince thinks for a moment.

“Thomas,” he says eventually, and when she nods he looks back at Sam and Dean. “He helped us with a Qalupalik back when we were still hunting. Hell, it’d be about ten years ago now. I could give him a call if you want,” he offers. “He’s mostly retired from the life, but he could help.”

“That’d be great,” Sam says, and Vince nods, heading for the back.

“Be right back.”

They take a few minutes to dig through the box of cameras, finally coming up with a couple of SLR’s--one with a jammed feed mechanism and the other a fairly new digital number that works pretty well except for the busted viewfinder--and Emily brings out another box of damaged lenses for them to sort through.

Dean ends up finding a telephoto lens with a hairline crack through the center, and has just finished twisting it onto one of the cameras when Vince steps back out into the shop with his phone at his ear.

“Yeah, I’ll put one of ‘em on,” he says, and holds out the phone. Sam, who’s standing closest, pushes to his feet to take it.

While he talks, filling Thomas in on why they’re heading to the island, Dean busies himself with finding a lens for the second camera.

“Where’d you get the dreamroot?” Emily asks as he puts another lens back--too wide to attach to the body--and Dean looks up. “Our old supplier fell off the face of the planet a couple of months back.”

“A guy in Missouri,” he says, sitting back to dig his cell out of his pocket. “I can give you his number if you want? He had loads of it.”

“That’d be great, thanks.”

By the time Sam gets off the phone, Dean’s found a lens to fit--smaller, but it’ll have to do--and Emily’s tracked down a couple of old birdwatching books and a pair of binoculars.

“What did he say?” Dean asks, and Sam hands the phone back to Vince.

“He said he hasn’t seen any demon signs, or anything else weird, but most of the island is deserted so even if they are there it’d be hard to tell without specifically looking. I told him to hold off until we get there.”

“How about possible locations?”

“There’s a couple of abandoned military buildings on the uninhabited side of the island. He said he’d hike out there with us.”

“Awesome,” Dean says, and looks over at Vince. “Thanks for calling him.”

“No problem,” he says, waving off the gratitude. “Since we gave up the life, we’re just happy to help out any way we can.”

It’s almost closing time when they’re ready to leave, and Vince insists on giving them a ride back to their motel.

“Make sure you let us know when you’ve found your friend,” Emily says, waving as they step outside, and Dean shoots her a smile.

“Hopefully it’ll be soon,” he says.

The drive back to the motel is quick, and Vince wishes them luck when they step out.

Eating an early meal of crappy burgers from the McDonalds across the street, Dean watches the clock. It doesn’t go unnoticed.

“It’s too early,” Sam says.

“Shut up. I know it is.”

“Watch TV or something,” Sam tells him, flipping to the next page of the birdwatching book that he actually seems interested in reading. “You’re driving me insane.”

Ignoring the urge to repeat Sam’s words back to him in a mocking voice, Dean picks up the remote and flips through the channels as he shoves another few fries into his mouth.

When his phone beeps at ten p.m., he doesn’t hesitate to turn the TV off. He’s not even sure what he was watching.

Making the tea takes no time at all, and he doesn’t even grimace as he swallows it down. The last thing he sees before he drifts to sleep is Sam laughing at him.

This time, Dean finds him in a house that seems familiar somehow. It’s abandoned, dusty and dark. Castiel is standing in the kitchen, running his hand over the surface of the countertop.

“Love what you’ve done with the place,” Dean jokes, and Castiel jerks a little, turning in surprise.

“Dean,” he says, mouth splitting into a smile.

“Miss me?”

“Immensely.”

The honesty is almost too much to bear. Dean looks at the floor. He only looks up again when Castiel’s feet shuffle into his view, bare toes peeking out from pale gray hospital pajamas. It’s weird, he thinks, to see Castiel’s toes.

“How are you?” Castiel asks when he meets his eyes, and Dean can’t help but laugh. “What?”

“Nothing,” Dean says, shaking his head. “Just--we’re in your head, and you’ve been a hostage for months, and you’re asking me how I am.”

“We do seem to keep exceeding our previous benchmarks for the absurd,” Castiel agrees with a smile.

“That’s one way of putting it,” Dean says. “But, uh... I’m actually okay. Got some good news for you.”

Castiel’s eyes widen a little.

“What is it?”

“We think we’ve figured out where you are,” he says, and just about forgets how to speak with the way Castiel is looking at him. “From the stuff you showed me last time, we’re pretty sure it’s one of these two islands in the Bering Sea.”

At that, Castiel’s expression falters a little.

“Are you-- how am I--”

“We’re already in Anchorage now,” Dean tells him. “Landed here day before yesterday. We were supposed to fly out to St Paul Island today, but the weather was bad for flying so the flight got bumped to tomorrow.”

“I’m sorry,” Castiel says, and Dean pulls a face. “I know you don’t like to fly.”

“I like not having you around less.”

Castiel looks down at that, his lips curving up in a pleased smile, and Dean can barely control the urge to reach out and touch him. He wonders if he should. Castiel speaks again before he can.

“I overheard the demons speaking the day after your last visit,” he says. “They mentioned somewhere called North Lake.”

“North Lake?” Dean repeats, and nods. “Alright. I’ll look for that on the map when we get there.”

“It’s about a mile north from where ever I am. From what they said, I think that the only town nearby is to the south.”

“That’ll make things easier,” Dean grins.

“They have wards, though,” Castiel adds. “I think that’s how they knew you were coming last time.”

Dean sighs. There’s always extra problems.

“I’ll put together some hex bags to keep us off their radar,” Dean tells him. “Anything else?”

“Yes,” Castiel says, and the building they’re in flickers away until they’re standing in a long hallway. In front of them, there’s a door marked Room 7. The door swings open, and through the opening Dean sees a distorted view of glowing light, spilling from hundreds of bottles, lining the walls. “I found where they’ve been keeping the grace.”

When Dean tries to step inside for a better look, the image just shifts around.

“I saw it through the grate on the door opposite,” Castiel explains, gesturing back toward the door on the other side of the hallway. “I couldn’t get any closer, but it’s all there. All the grace they’ve taken since they started. They’re storing it.”

“What are they going to do with it?”

“I have no idea,” Castiel admits. “But this much grace... Dean, it’s equivalent to that of an archangel. Maybe even more.”

Staring in at the bright light, Dean takes a steadying breath before he looks back at Castiel, who is looking away. Dean can tell he’s trying to find the words for something. Trying to find a way to make a terrible idea more palatable.

“What is it?” he asks, and Castiel looks back at him with a grimace.

“If it comes down to it,” Castiel says carefully. “If it seems like they’re about to use it for whatever it is they’re planning, I could absorb it. Doing so would release a tremendous amount of power, but it would destroy the grace. They wouldn’t be able to--”

“How?” Dean cuts him off, his heart pounding hard. “How would absorbing it destroy the grace?”

“It’s enough grace for an archangel, and my body isn’t... it would... I would...” Castiel trails off, crossing his arms over his chest, and Dean narrows his eyes as he steps into his space, ducking his head a little to force him to meet his eyes.

“You looking for a nice way to say _explode_ there, Cas?” he asks, barely keeping his voice steady. “Because you’re not gonna find one.”

“It would take the demons out as well if they were close enough,” Castiel says, as if that means a goddamn thing.

“Don’t you dare,” Dean tells him.

“Dean--”

“No, Cas! Jesus, would you listen to yourself? We’ve all sacrificed ourselves too many times, and I’m not-- you can’t do that again, okay? We’re so close. We’ll find you. I’ll find you, and I’ll kill every last one of those bastards before you can even think about doing that shit, you hear me?”

“I’m not saying I want to do it,” Castiel says, a petulant tone to his voice that makes him seem more like an unruly teenager than the ancient being he is. “It could be cataclysmic, but whatever the demons are planning is sure to be worse. I’m just offering it as a last resort.”

“It’s not any kind of resort,” Dean says. “Promise me.”

For a long moment, Castiel stares back at him. Eventually, his shoulders slump.

“I promise.”

“Thank you.”

Sighing, Dean gives in to the part of him that’s been wanting to reach out since the moment he saw Castiel here, and he closes his hand over his shoulder.

Something in the touch is different than it usually is, though. More charged. Dean lets his hand linger, staring at his fingers curling into gray fabric. This must be what he’s been wearing this whole time, Dean realizes. Months upon months, and he’s been barefoot in hospital pajamas, locked in one cage after another and tortured. Has had parts of himself stolen--pain like a limb being torn loose, Adaeoet had said--and his mind tampered with.

All because he was caught alone.

All because Dean was stupid enough to cut him and Sam off.

“I shouldn’t have left,” he says after a while, and Castiel shakes his head immediately, vigorously, like Dean is talking nonsense.

“Don’t do this to yourself.”

Dean just sighs, pulling his hand back. To his surprise, Castiel catches it. Around them, the hallway fades away, and Dean is confused to look around and find they’re in a bar.

A sign hanging on one wall reads Doc Marley’s Cocktails, and Dean looks over at Castiel with a raised brow.

“Do you remember coming here with me?” Castiel asks, his hand still curled around Dean’s, and Dean nods.

“We were staking out the place,” he says, and follows when Castiel leads him toward the spot where they’d sat here. “Waiting for that cupid.”

“I told you I needed your help,” Castiel says, pushing lightly until Dean takes a seat at the bar, turned on the stool to face him where he still stands. “But that wasn’t entirely true.”

“It wasn’t?”

“No. I just... I knew that I would be locked inside heaven after it was done, and the thought of... of not spending one more night with you, even just sitting beside you in a poorly lit bar, was... unbearable.”

“You could have said something,” Dean says, and Castiel huffs out a laugh, raising an eyebrow as he looks at him.

“And what would you have done?”

“I don’t know,” Dean admits.

He looks down at their hands, still linked together, and squeezes.

“I probably would have asked you not to leave, though,” he says, running his thumb over the side of Castiel’s palm. “If I’d known you wanted to, y’know... be here. With me. I would have asked you to stay. Like I wanted to.”

“You wanted to?”

“Of course I did,” Dean says, frowning up at him. “You didn’t know?”

The shake of Castiel’s head is tiny, but it’s there, and Dean’s standing before he’s even really thought about it, pulling Castiel closer to wind his arms around him.

“We’re a couple of dumbasses,” he says, Castiel’s hair tickling against his cheek, and he feels a huff of amusement on his neck as Castiel hugs him back.

“We’ve been over this Dean,” Castiel says, and Dean feels the rumble of his voice against his chest. “Less dumb, less ass.”

Dean smiles, squeezing him a little tighter, and feeling a little bold he tilts his chin to speak against his neck.

“Just a couple, then.”

There’s a pause, a moment that draws out a little too long and leaves Dean worrying that he’s made an utter fool of himself, but then Castiel squeezes him back.

“That’s preferable, I think.”

Letting go, Dean pulls away, letting his hand rest for a moment on Castiel’s hip as he looks at him. Castiel’s tongue darts out over his lower lip, and Dean’s eyes dart down to track the movement. The desire to lean in is almost impossible to fight.

“God, I hope I find you soon,” he says.

“Maybe tomorrow,” Castiel tells him, and Dean smiles wide.

“Maybe tomorrow,” he agrees.

Still, there’s a frightened part of him that worries they’re wrong. Maybe they’ll actually find Castiel tomorrow, but he’s been sure before, and he doesn’t know if he can take another false lead.

“In case we don’t--” he starts, and cuts himself off with a shake of his head. “If it takes a little longer, I’ve still got one of your feathers.”

“Don’t use it if you don’t have to,” Castiel says. “Even if that means waiting for another two weeks, we shouldn’t risk using up our only remaining means of communication in case we need it later.”

“God, I hope it’s not going to be another two days,” Dean says, sighing. “You’re right, though. Tomorrow’s June 16th, so... let’s say if we don’t find you by the end of the month, I’ll visit again then.”

“Fourteen days,” Castiel says, exhaling slowly as he nods. “Fourteen days is manageable.”

“But I could... if you want, I could pray,” Dean offers. “Tomorrow, maybe? To let you know if we think we’ve found you.”

“Pray anyway,” Castiel says. “It’s... comforting.”

“Yeah?”

“I like when you pray to me,” Castiel admits, and Dean is surprised to see a tinge of red to his cheeks as he says it, as though he’s embarrassed. “Hearing your voice. Feeling what you feel as you send it out into the world. It makes me...”

“What?”

“It makes me feel closer to you,” Castiel says simply.

“Oh,” Dean says, and feels his own face growing hot. He looks down. “I’m, uh... I’m sorry I ever stopped. I was worried they’d be able to tell, and after what Adaeoet told us, I didn’t want to risk you being memory-wiped again.”

“If you make sure to only pray at night or in the early morning, there’s no way they’ll know. Once lights are out they don’t really check on us at all, and I’m alone in my cell.”

Dean considers this for a moment.

“I don’t know how much more time we have,” he says. “But could you-- do you think you could show me what it looks like where you are?”

Almost immediately, the bar around them shimmers and fades, and Dean looks around the close walls of Castiel’s cell; dark gray and aged, scuff-marked near the floor. Unlike what he saw in Michigan, the bed here is little more than a thin mattress on the floor. There’s at least a few blankets on top. Still, it worries Dean to see.

Castiel must recognize the expression on his face.

“I’m low on grace,” he says, making Dean look up at him. “But I’m not quite human.”

“You said those other angels froze on the boat,” Dean reminds him.

“It’s cold here, but not freezing,” he says, before amending. “Not for the past couple of months, anyway. I can handle it.”

Frowning, Dean looks around the small room, taking in the few folded paper flowers on the floor.

“You made those?”

“It helps me remember,” Castiel says with a shrug, and at Dean’s confused look he explains.

“Muscle memory is harder to erase, and the repetitive motion acts as a kind of mnemonic device. If they Crown me again it should make remembering easier.”

“How’d you get so smart?” he asks.

“As you’ve often reminded me, I’m as old as time,” Castiel says, looking sidelong at Dean before he cracks a small smile. “Also, I watched a documentary on ‘brain training’ while babysitting for Nora.”

Dean snorts.

“Naturally.”

Together, they step out of Castiel’s cell, and Dean takes in the dimly-lit hallway, lined with doors to other cells. Castiel takes him through the rooms one by one, eventually leading him to the upper level where he shows him the long hallway where Room 7 is located.

“I could be wrong,” he says as they reach the furthest point he’s been able to walk to. “But I’m fairly certain that this is the way out.”

Crouching down to inspect the symbols etched into the floor, Dean looks back up at him.

“Sure looks that way,” he agrees, pushing back to his feet and glancing back the way they’d come. “What was on the other side of the mess hall?”

“The extraction room,” Castiel says, and something in his jaw tics at the thought. Dean moves to touch his elbow.

“We don’t have to--”

Before he can finish, the hallway crumbles around them, bright light leeching in and washing everything out to white. Between one blink and the next, Castiel is gone.

Dean wakes with his hand still outstretched, fingers closing in the air.


	28. St. Paul

 

The plane to St Paul Island has propellers, and they have to walk across the tarmac to board it. Dean can feel his legs straining to turn him around and run for his life the closer they get to it, and he doesn’t doubt that if he wasn’t headed to find Cas he’d probably be doing just that.

There are only three other people on the flight, all locals returning home, and they chat easily with the flight attendants as if they’re old friends. They probably are, Dean thinks. That thought makes him a little calmer, somehow.

It takes a little under four hours to fly to the island, and when they land they find Thomas waiting for them at the airport. He’s a big guy, almost as tall as Sam but twice as muscled, and if it weren’t for the pronounced laughter lines around his eyes he’d be an imposing sight.

“You have a good flight?” he asks as he heads over to help them with their bags. For a moment Dean wonders how he knows what they look like before it occurs to him that he probably doesn’t--he just knows the other three people.

“Pretty smooth,” Sam says, at the same time Dean says, “Horrible.”

“Yeah, I’ll take rough seas over smooth skies any day,” Thomas says, sticking out his hand to each of them as they introduce themselves, and laughing along with Dean’s low opinion of air travel before he picks up one of their bags and tilts his chin toward the door. “Let’s drop your stuff off at the Lodge and get to work.”

“Best idea I’ve heard all day,” Dean says.

The Lodge is one of only two locations offering accommodation on the island, and it’s situated at the very edge of town, overlooking the sparse, brightly-colored houses that make up the tiny village of St Paul.

Boasting ten individual rooms, each with enough space for one double bed, all of which share a communal bathroom and cooking area in the middle of the building, The Lodge is clean and tidy, making it a damn sight better than some of the places they’ve stayed over the years despite the small quarters.

Besides, with a little luck, they’ll only be here one night. If they find Cas, Dean doesn’t think he’s going to be too concerned about his room being too small.

Still, a room without a table doesn’t exactly make for a particularly good planning area, so after dropping their non-hunting related bags off in their rooms, Sam and Dean climb back into Thomas’ old pick-up. On the back window, a peeling bumper sticker reads MY OTHER CAR IS A BOAT. Dean has the fleeting thought that had they ever met, Thomas and Bobby would have gotten along like a house on fire.

Thomas house is only a few minutes down the road; a dusty-red clapboard pushing up out of a patch of lush grass. The neighboring houses are barely five feet away on either side, and as they walk up to the door, the ankles of their jeans growing dark from the wet grass, a little kid presses his face to the window of the house on the right. Thomas waves.

The kid presses his mouth to the glass and puffs out his cheeks like a fish.

“Friendly neighbors,” Dean jokes, and Thomas laughs as he opens the door--it’s not even locked.

“People around here aren’t quick to trust outsiders, but that’s only ‘cause we all know each other so well it’s like a whole town of family.”

Looking back toward the door, Dean admires the hand-carved woodwork around the frame; devil’s traps and protective warding intricately woven together in a design that is reminiscent of the fresco at the bunker, if completely different in its style and execution.

“Not everything’s friendly, though,” he says, indicating the carved sigils. “That’s some serious mojo.”

“Old habits,” Thomas says simply, turning back to them. “Now--you boys want some coffee? I’ll be taking mine Irish if that’s alright with you. Somethin’ tells me I’m gonna need it, considering what little Sam told me over the phone.”

It’s always a risky moment, telling a seasoned hunter that angels exist, but to Sam and Dean’s surprise Thomas takes it in stride, barely skipping a beat before he asks, “They have anything to do with that so-called meteor shower last year?”

“Yeah, actually,” Sam says, glancing over at Dean. “There’s this one angel, Metatron, and he--”

“He’s basically running for douche of the century,” Dean supplies, cutting Sam off before he starts giving too many details. “He hit Heaven’s big red button, and now all the angels are stuck on Earth, sans wings.”

“And this friend you’re looking for--Castiel. He’s one of them?”

“Yeah.”

“Alright,” Thomas says, and tips a little more whiskey into his coffee. “Let me get my map.”

“So last time I spoke to Cas, he told me he heard the demons mentioning that they were about a mile south of North Lake,” Dean says, sitting down at the table as Thomas comes back, a faded map folded under his arm. “That mean anything to you?”

Thomas shakes his head.

“Doesn’t ring a bell.”

“Yeah, I tried googling it, but the only thing that came up in Alaska was a tiny lake right near the bottom of Prince of Wales Island,” Dean says. “Figured it wasn’t there since a mile south would put them underwater.”

“Maybe they just meant a lake to the north?” Thomas suggests, unfolding the map and spreading it out over the table, pinning the corners with his three-quarters empty bottle of Jack and a chunky old cell phone.

“That’s what I thought,” Sam agrees, and he looks at the map. “Where are the abandoned bases?”

Thomas taps his forefinger on a couple of points. Dean hums under his breath, pointing to one of the locations near the middle of the island.

“Okay, how about we try that one first? There’s a lake not too far north of it, so it’s our best bet.”

“Sounds good,” Thomas says. “We’ll head out first thing. You two bring hiking shoes?”

The fog is thick when they set out, hanging heavy over the grassy hills, and by the time Thomas pulls his pick-up over at the end of a winding dirt track, it’s just beginning to turn gold with the dawn.

“Can’t drive any further,” he tells them, opening his door with a creak and heading to the back, and they follow, collecting their small arsenal before following him off track. The grass here is knee-high and smattered with weeds, wormwood and angelica bursting through in patches, but like the rest of the island, there’s not a tree in sight.

It’s about an hour of slow trekking over uneven ground before the first abandoned military building comes into view. At a distance, it doesn’t look promising. There are no noticeable tracks in the grass nearby that would have been left by recent visitors, and a couple of deer are grazing right in front of the door, which appears to be open.

Still, they move forward slowly, just in case.

The deer hear them pretty quick, darting off around the building and down the hill behind it when they’re still a fair way off. It’s clear once they get closer that there’s nobody around.

“This is the only bunker south of a lake, right?” Dean asks, glancing over at Thomas as they come to a stop before the dilapidated building, and Thomas nods, hoisting his gun over his shoulder.

“The only other building that could be big enough for what you described is about three miles that way,” he says, pointing as he squints into the distance. “Over near South-West Point. Nothing north of that but hills and the ocean.”

“We’ll check it out,” Sam says, clapping Dean on the shoulder. “Right Dean?”

“I just-- let’s check inside first,” he says, looking back at the rusted door where it hangs from its hinges. “Maybe they were here. Maybe it’s like Michigan again and they saw us coming.”

He barely believes it himself--the hex bags they’re wearing should have them pretty well hidden--but he knows that if he doesn’t at least go inside to check he’s going to end up convincing himself that they missed something, and so he doesn’t wait for Sam or Thomas to reply before he pulls his flashlight from his pocket and steps inside.

The first few rooms are a mess of broken furniture and graffiti that looks left over from kids in the nineties. On at least three walls he sees that omnipresent Superman “S” that every twelve year old worth their salt drew all over anything they got their hands on back then. Beyond that, there’s an embarrassing declaration of love for the Backstreet Boys scrawled over the wall and the instructions to CALL JANIE 4 A GOOD TIME with a phone number that has been aggressively crossed out and rewritten just as many times as the girl’s name. In the fourth room he finds nothing but crumpled beer cans.

The hallways all look wrong.

The staircase has different railing to the place Castiel showed him.

He’s not sure whether he’s more relieved that this means they probably haven’t been moved again, or gutted that they’re in the wrong place.

“Dean,” Sam says from somewhere behind him, and Dean blinks, lifting his flashlight from where it’s been casting a lonely circle of light down the stairwell. “Dean, we should check the other building.”

“Yeah,” he agrees, and scrubs at his face with his palm before turning to follow him back outside.

Back out in the early morning light, he tries for a hopeful smile as he looks over at Sam and Thomas and knows it falls horribly short.

“Onto the next one,” he says, marching forward through the grass in the direction of the car. “Third time’s the charm.”


	29. Take, Take, Take

 

The day after Dean’s latest dreamwalking visit, Castiel feels his longing growing as the hours drag on. All through his evening meal, he finds himself counting the minutes until lights out, just on the hope that Dean will pray to him. That he’ll have good news.

He does his assigned job of washing up as thoroughly as he can, forcing himself to work against the temptation of distraction, and when he finally steps into his cell and lays down beneath his blankets he can barely stay still for all his pent-up energy.

It’s almost an hour before Dean’s prayer comes.

 _Cas_ , he says. _We’ve arrived at St Paul, have a guy taking us out to what we hope is the bunker you’re in first thing in the morning. Should get there right after dawn, so try and be awake then. We’re gonna crash early tonight so we’re in good shape for a fight, so uh... goodnight, I guess. I, uh... yeah. Night, Cas._

Willing himself to sleep does little good, and he finds himself lying awake for hours, counting time. The lights go out, and before he knows it they’re coming back on.

It’s too soon; he’s certain it’s too soon.

By his count, it should only be around four o’clock. While his internal clock is admittedly not quite as accurate as the clock in the mess hall, he knows there is no possible way that it is seven in the morning.

Something is wrong.

He sits up, blinking his dry eyes, and looks around his room for something he can use if Sam and Dean have truly found him. If he’s going to need to fight alongside them to secure his escape, he’ll need a weapon. Unsurprisingly, those are hard to come by in this place.

The best he can do is to twist his spare pair of pants into a makeshift rope, and he’s partway

through doing so when he hears the cells further down the hall being unlocked. He pauses, listening as Baradiel asks what is going on, and Ikenna answers coolly;

“Extractions are starting early today.”

As the rest of the cells are unlocked, his own among the last, he listens for any sign of a commotion and hears none. He unwinds the pants, folding them back up and placing them in back where they belong before stepping out into the hallway.

The others all look as tired as he feels. He wonders what the reason is for the sudden change, but asking is pointless. Instead, he follows Ikenna’s instructions without question, heading upstairs to wait for his extraction.

Castiel is scheduled for the third extraction of the day, and after standing behind Raguel for nearly forty-five minutes--as opposed to the usual thirty--the door finally opens to let Odatt out.

He’s barely supporting his own weight, leaning heavily against the wall, and Min steps out behind him to look at the waiting angels.

“3-06,” she calls out, and the angel behind Castiel--her vessel a short, plump woman with wide gray eyes and blonde hair to her shoulders--steps forward. “Help 3-03 back to his cell.”

The angel, Levanael, nods and hurries forward, looping her arm around Odatt’s waist and supporting him as he moves slowly down the hallway. Min watches them for a long moment before turning back to the others.

“Let’s go, 4-04,” she says, and holds the door wide until Raguel steps inside. It closes with a heavy thud, and Castiel starts counting.

Fifty minutes pass before the doors open again, and like Odatt, Raguel needs assistance to return to her cell. They’re taking more, Castiel realizes. He feels his stomach twisting into knots.

“Hurry up, 4-01,” Min says.

Once he’s sitting in the chair, facing that tiny window through which he can see that the sun is high and bright and well past dawn, he swallows the fear that is trying to overtake him, pushing down the suddenly unavoidable thought that Sam and Dean were wrong. They’re not here. They haven’t found him.

The extraction feels never ending, and not for the first time, Castiel fantasizes about yanking the needle from his throat and using it to stab Min through the eye. He knows it must be made of the same substance as an angel blade for it to reach his grace, and so it could be deadly for a demon if he cut her deeply enough in the right place, but in his weakened and near-human state he knows that he wouldn’t make it far before one of the others caught him.

Fighting back right now would be akin to suicide.

That night, Dean’s prayer comes as he’s walking back from the mess hall, and Castiel has to fight to remain hopeful.

_I’m so sorry, Cas. I was so sure we’d found you._

Dean’s disappointment is palpable, and Castiel wishes he could reach back to him. Instead, he holds onto the ache in his chest in the hope that by keeping it Dean might feel it a little less.

 _We’re hopefully gonna fly over to St George Island tomorrow,_ Dean goes on as Castiel steps into his room and slips into bed. _But Thomas--the guy here who was helping us look for you--said visibility is supposed to be bad again, so we might not be able to get off the island for a couple more days. And... I don’t want to jinx it, but St George is a bit of a long shot. There’s no lakes on the map, so I don’t know if maybe North Lake that they mentioned is too small to show up or if it’s the wrong place. But just... hold on, okay? We’re not giving up. I’m never gonna stop looking for you._

There’s a long pause, almost long enough for Castiel to think that he’s stopped praying. The lights flicker out as he starts up again.

_Gotta be honest, Cas, it’s taking a lot of self-control not to use that last feather tonight. I really want to see you. Maybe I’ll get lucky and dream about you anyway._

There’s a burst of some feeling, then, amusement tinged with embarrassment, and Castiel feels something warm in his chest as it fills him.

_God, that sounded cheesy. Sorry. I just, um... I miss you. I’ll talk to you tomorrow._

Lying in the dark of his cell, Castiel turns onto his side and sends out a prayer of his own, whispered against his pillow.

“I miss you, too.”

The following morning, Dean prays while Castiel is standing in the shower stall, lukewarm water running weakly down over his shoulders. The skies, Dean tells him, are clear. He and Sam are heading to St George around midday, hitching a ride on a small plane owned by a woman named Sandra--a friend of the hunter who’s been helping them--while she takes some delivery to the neighboring island.

Though Dean reminds him that they’re still not sure that they’ve found the right place, and that they probably won’t get a chance to actually search the island until the following morning, Castiel can’t help but get more and more hopeful as the day goes on.

His almost hour-long extraction does it’s best to crush every positive thought he has, but even as he staggers back to his cell with one arm looped around the shoulder of an angel he can barely see in his weakened state, he can’t help but think, maybe tomorrow.

But tomorrow comes, and the Winchesters don’t.

Another day, and another, and Castiel listens to Dean’s increasingly helpless prayers while a pit opens up in his chest.

A little part of him can’t help but will the days to disappear even more quickly, if only so a week will pass and Dean will feel justified in using that last feather to visit his dreams again.

Each morning, his first and second thoughts on waking are, in order, _maybe today_ , and _how much longer until the end of the month?_

Today, it’s June 23rd, and it’s been a week since he spoke to Dean.

His extraction is scheduled for the afternoon, and Castiel spends the morning on cleaning duty, scrubbing the tile of the bathroom floor with a stiff-bristled brush and soapy water than wrinkles his fingers. It’s another sign of how close to human he is now. How little grace still remains inside him.

The past week’s extractions have all been close to an hour long, and he can feel his energy levels fading more and more as the days go on. It’s clear that whatever the demons are planning, they’re straining to collect as much grace as possible now.

The knowledge only makes him feel more helpless.

It’s about ten minutes to twelve when, with aching knees and pruned hands, he pushes to his feet to dispose of the bucket of water and follow Bataivah back toward their cells.

He’s halfway to the door when the room starts to shake.

Lurching toward the wall, he staggers, eyes wide as a long, jagged crack forms in the tile beneath his feet.

“4-01!” Bataivah shouts from the hallway, her usually soft voice coming loud and frightened as she tries to push the door open, finding it wedged shut as the earthquake goes on.

“I’m alright!” Castiel calls back, clutching at the wall and watching as the water in the bucket sloshes out in violent splashes and a pipe leading to one of the shower heads bursts from the wall.

It feels as though it lasts forever, though by Castiel’s count it’s about twenty seconds. When it finally stops, there’s still a steady pounding on the door. It takes him a moment to realize it’s Bataivah trying to get inside.

“Ba--” he starts, the panic brought on by the quake making him momentarily forget that he’s not supposed to remember before he catches himself, grateful that nobody is likely to have heard. “2-06, I’m alright.”

“Move away from the door,” she calls back, and he steps back. It’s only a couple of seconds before the whole thing rattles in its frame, the sound of heavy thuds on the other side coming once, twice, before it bursts open, Aloai stumbling inside. Pulling himself back to his full height, he looks at Castiel.

“Are you alright?”

“I’m fine,” Castiel says, and grabs at the wall again when the ground below them gives another rumble. It’s over within a couple of seconds, and not nearly as strong. Stronger by far is the sudden and intense feeling of panic that Castiel can feel coming in from Dean. He blinks, shaking his head, and tries to compose himself to alleviate the worry on Aloai’s face. “Thank you, 3-04.”

Aloai nods in place of a reply, looking back toward the door where Bataivah is still standing, her arms wrapped around her middle, and before any of them can speak again a siren starts.

It’s distant and muffled, coming from somewhere beyond the walls of their prison, and it rises slowly before falling again. It’s an unnerving sound. It stirs something instinctive deep in Castiel’s gut, and almost at the same moment he hears Dean start consciously praying; a litany of _Cas, please tell me you didn’t do something stupid, please be okay, please please please_ \--

“Prisoners, down to your cells and close your doors!” comes Ikenna’s cry from somewhere down the hall, loud over the distant siren, but doing little to drown out Dean’s prayers. “To your cells, now! Move!”

Further still, coming from somewhere near the extraction room, Castiel can hear Sullivan barking similar orders to the angels there, and as he follows Aloai and Bataivah toward the stairs he sends up a silent prayer that nobody had been in the extraction chair when the first quake hit.

Dean’s voice echoes in his head, still, and it’s all Castiel can do to push it to the back of his consciousness if only so he can focus on trying to understand what’s going on.

Ikenna and Sullivan pass them as they reach the stairwell, heading in the opposite direction toward Room Seven and the hallway Castiel suspects leads outside, and he glances back at them as he descends.

“--already on their way there,” he hears Ikenna telling Sullivan as they hurry away. “You’d better hope the new store room held up or they’ll--”

The rest of his sentence is lost as they move out of earshot, and Castiel slows his pace, steadying one hand on the wall as the building shakes again. Far away, he can still hear the siren blaring, Dean’s prayers a constant current below it all.

Ahead of him, the other angels disappear around the corner of the stairwell, dutifully heading for their cells, and it occurs to Castiel that nobody is actually following them. None of the demons are coming downstairs to lock their cell doors or to make sure they’re even there--Min and Godric, from what he heard Ikenna saying, are likely heading toward the bunker a mile north, and Ikenna and Sullivan are presumably joining them.

For the first time since they arrived here, the angels are completely alone within the building.

He stops moving and looks back up the stairs, weighing his options; to tell the other angels who they really are with the risk that the demons will come back before they believe him, or to head back upstairs alone to see if the quake might have weakened the sigils first.

Clenching his jaw, he spares one more glance down the stairs before running back up them, confident that if he can get out, he’ll be able to bring help back for the rest of them.

As he passes the mess hall, he feels that same sense of dread that the warding gave off last time, but doesn’t slow his pace. Running as quickly as he can, he holds one hand out to steady himself through another aftershock as he reaches the door to Room Seven. While it’s tempting to try again to look inside, he’s almost certain that the grace has all been moved--given Ikenna’s words to Sullivan--and instead pushes onward.

When he reaches the point he couldn’t pass last time, he finds himself skidding to a stop against his will.

It takes everything he has not to scream.

He slams his knuckles up against nothing, hard, and bites back a grunt of pain when the skin splits with the force of it, pain radiating up through his hands and wrists.

\-- _please, please, Cas please tell me you’re okay, please be okay, please_ \--

Forcing out an unsteady breath, he looks back the way he’d come and tries to come up with some other plan. It’s only a couple of seconds before he does.

His feet slam against the concrete floor, heels stinging with the force as he races back past the mess hall and to the extraction room. The door isn’t even fully closed, and for a brief moment outside he worries that he’ll find one of his brothers or sisters slumped over in the chair.

To his immense relief, it’s empty when he steps inside. The sound of the siren is louder than ever, and he immediately sees why.

High on the wall, the window has shattered. Castiel wastes no time in dragging the metal cart underneath it, leaning his weight on the surface and sparing a second to hope it won’t collapse before throwing caution to the wind and climbing on top. It slides a little as he does, and reaching up, he grips the narrow window ledge. Tiny shards of glass dig into his fingers, and he dusts them away as best he can before they can pierce his skin before he finally cranes his neck to look outside.

It takes a moment for his eyes to adjust to the brightness and the shock of frigid wind blowing through the opening, but after a couple of seconds he can make out a mountain in the distance, its peak disappearing into low-hanging cloud, and before it, a comparatively smaller--but still rather tall--hill. Somewhere between the two, he can just make out a couple of thin columns of smoke rising steadily into the sky.

Chimney smoke, he guesses. That must be the town.

He turns his head to the side, trying his hardest to see anything else that might help him. To the left--east, he thinks--there’s nothing but barren tundra and a narrow, unfinished road before a wide lake that appears to be separated from the ocean by only a few hundred feet of rocky ground.

To the west, he can see the remains of a chainlink fence, half fallen, which stands between the building he’s in and yet more rocky earth. Distantly, he can make out the fuzzy blue-gray of the ocean there, as well, and comforts himself in the knowledge that he and the Winchester’s are on the right track in their belief that he’s on an island.

As he stares out, looking for anything at all, the siren blares on, and Dean keeps praying, _Cas, Cas, Cas_. Without making any conscious decision to do so, Castiel finds himself replying, _I’m here, I’m here, I’m here._

He’s just about to climb down from his perch when he notices a little wooden sign beyond the chain fence, so faded from its many years exposed to the elements that it’s barely visible where it sticks up out of the grass.

Looking right at it, though, he can just make out most of the letters in what was once bold red print:

**YO_ ARE NO_ LE___NG RAD_O _I_Y**

The siren cuts off as he’s staring at it, silence enveloping him suddenly and without warning, and Castiel scrambles back to the floor, moving the cart swiftly back to its usual place before heading for the door. Before he leaves, he glances back toward the glass on the floor and darts back over, snatching up a shard just small enough to hide but big enough to be useful, and runs as fast as his feet will carry him back downstairs.

The doors to all the cells, he finds, are closed as Ikenna had demanded, and he slips into his own cell quickly and quietly, unfolding one of his larger paper flowers to hide the glass shard inside. He’s been sitting on his mattress for all of three minutes when he hears the click of Min’s heels descending the stairs.

In his head, Dean keeps praying.


	30. Feel The Earth Move

 

Sitting at the table in their motel room back in Anchorage, Dean stares with exhausted eyes at yet another useless map.

Since he woke up, he’s been working slowly through the maybe list he’d put together before they’d followed the Red-Legged Kittiwake clue that led absolutely nowhere.

Searching “North Lake” comes up with nothing useful at all, no matter how many times he tries it, and so he’s been slowly scrolling over zoomed-in maps of all the possible areas one by one, looking for unnamed lakes to the north of small, un-marked structures.

Thus far, he’s managed to cross off Caines Head, which has its only military bunkers south of the town, and Fort Randall, which isn’t nearly as abandoned as his previous research had lead him to believe.

Yakutat has far too many unnamed lakes and structures to even deal with, and he moved it to the bottom of his list after spending half an hour on one small corner, figuring he’ll come back to it if he needs to.

Amchitka Island has a couple of possible spots, but it’s also--according to the searches he carries out after finding them--both volcanic and tectonically unstable, and it hasn’t had any kind of population beyond a very occasional military presence since 1867. Given that the place where Castiel is being held apparently has running water and electricity, Dean figures the chances of it being on that particular island are relatively low.

Still, he marks down the coordinates onto the motel notepad, just in case.

He’s yet to inspect the maps for Sitka, Shemya Island, Umnak Island, Adak Island, Rugged Island, Cape Chiniak and Kodiak Island, and though Sam is busy researching from another angle on his tablet across the room, Dean hasn’t heard a word from him since they ate breakfast at eight.

Glancing at the time--almost 12--he rolls his head from side to side, cracking his neck. It’s loud enough to make Sam look up, and Dean kneads at his tense shoulders as he gets to his feet.

“I’m gonna get coffee,” he says, and Sam nods, looking back at his tablet. “You want me to pick up some lunch for you?”

“Whatever you’re having,” Sam says. Dean doesn’t bother mentioning that he wasn’t planning to eat. The fact that Sam chose that particular string of words means he knows full well that Dean was intending on a lunch of caffeine and stressful thinking.

Without another word, he picks up his wallet and room key and slips out into the windy parking lot before climbing into the rental car. The radio comes on when he starts it up, and he’s waiting to pull out onto the road when the song fades out, giving way to a news bulletin.

“We’ve just received word that a magnitude-8.0 earthquake has been recorded in the Aleutian Island Chain,” the reporter says, her voice crackling through poor reception. “A tsunami warning has been issued for the Aleutian Islands, and authorities are urging anyone near the coast to move to higher ground immediately.”

The reporter repeats the warning once more before swiftly moving on to the next item on her list, but Dean doesn’t even hear it.

All that he can think of is Castiel telling him that he could absorb the stolen grace; that doing it would be enough to take out the demons just through proximity. Doing it would be cataclysmic, he’d said.

He promised he wouldn’t do it, Dean tries to tell himself, but the thought means little once the panic sets in. He knows that Aleutian Islands covers more than one of the places on his maybe list, and his imagination is vivid and horrifying.

Throwing the car into reverse, he backs into the nearest parking space before jumping out and heading back to the room.

 _Cas_ , he prays, fumbling the key before it slides into place, _please tell me you didn’t do something stupid._

When he bursts through the door, Sam’s head jerks up, his brow wrinkled in obvious concern.

“What’s wrong?” he asks immediately, standing, and Dean heads straight for the laptop, flipping it open and navigating to the first news website that pops up. There’s a story on the quake right at the top, linking to a map, and he clicks on it as Sam comes up behind him to read over his shoulder.

“Just happened about ten minutes ago,” Dean says, reading, and zooms in on the map. At the center is Amchitka Island. He swallows around the lump in his throat. “He promised me he wouldn’t.”

“He promised you?” Sam repeats, panic clear in his voice. “Dean, what are you talking about? What do you think happened?”

“I told you he found the grace,” Dean says, refreshing the page in hope that there’s new information. “He said if it seemed like the demons were about to do whatever it is they’re planning, he could absorb it.”

Sam’s brows lift, and Dean looks away, back at the screen that has a little blinking banner across the top; TSUNAMI WARNING IN EFFECT.

“And you think...” Sam starts, and Dean has to close the laptop before he can manage to speak again.

“He basically said that if he did, it would be too much for his body to handle. The grace would be destroyed, and so would anything that got too close. Including him.”

Sam’s breath all leaves him in a whoosh, and Dean leans heavily on the table.

“He promised me he wouldn’t,” Dean says again, closing his eyes. “He promised.”

“Dean, maybe it’s just a coincidence,” Sam says.

“Come on, Sam,” Dean says helplessly, shaking his head and crossing the room, the fear settling deep enough in his gut that he feels the need to physically move to get away from it. “It’s right on top of one of the islands on the shortlist.”

“But it’s the one without any power,” Sam points out. “It barely even made the shortlist.”

Dean wants to believe him more than anything, but if there’s one thing he’s never quite been able to get a handle on, it’s forced optimism. His last attempt, back when Frank Devereaux had convinced him that “fake it ‘til you make it” was actually good life advice, he’d ended up an even heavier drinker than usual.

Taking a deep breath, he tries to think up some plan, and his eyes fall on his duffel bag. Sitting on top is the box containing Castiel’s last feather.

It’s only June twenty-third, but if there was ever a reason to go off schedule, he thinks, this is it.

The ten hours between hearing about the earthquake and a time late enough to attempt dreamwalking are some of the slowest Dean has even endured. He’s been restless the entire time, jiggling his knee and clicking his pen and generally driving Sam to madness. He’s monosyllabic in every response. Sam telling him that the tsunami warning was cancelled earns no more than a terse grunt.

The burger Sam insisted on picking up for him mid-afternoon has remained largely untouched; the label on his bottle of soda, on the other hand, is in tatters.

When ten o’clock finally rolls around, Dean has never been more thankful for the fact that dream tea knocks him out faster than a fifth of whisky on an empty stomach.

Watching the electric kettle as it slowly comes to a boil, Dean rubs his hands together, tapping his toe impatiently on the linoleum of the kitchenette.

“Relax,” Sam tells him.

Dean levels him with a glare.

“Thanks,” he snaps. “I didn’t think of trying that.”

Rolling his eyes, Sam measures out the correct amount of herbs and dreamroot.

“I’m just saying--he’s probably fine. The updated map showed the epicenter was in the water, so--”

“Sam, don’t know if you’ve noticed, but logic isn’t helping.”

The light on the kettle clicks off, and Dean snatches it up immediately, elbowing Sam out of the way to fill the mug. The feathers, as usual, float up to the surface in clumps.

The mug is almost at his lips before Sam grabs it out of his hand, and all it takes is a raised brow that says really? before Dean clues in that he’s still standing by the counter. Sheepishly, he heads over to his bed and sits down, and Sam hands it over.

Dean doesn’t even grimace at the pungent smell as he drinks the whole mugful.

It’s dark at first, and for a few terrifying moments Dean is convinced that this is what it looks like when you dreamwalk a dead person. He’s seconds away from finding out what it feels like to hyperventilate in the dreamscape when he hears the sound of footsteps in water.

Holding his hand out, he feels along a rough wall of rock as he takes a hesitant step forward, finding his own feet submerged in cool water, pooled on the uneven floor of a cave.

Rounding a corner, he enters a wide chamber.

It’s dark, but in the middle he can just make out a familiar set of shoulders where Castiel standing, looking up toward a thousand tiny lights that dot the cave roof. At the sight of him Dean lets out a sound, some pathetic little thing between a gasp and a sob that tries to form itself around Castiel’s name. Though it’s quiet, Castiel still hears. He turns, the tips of his hair glowing dimly blue, and smiles.

Dean can barely breathe for relief. Without pause he barrels through the cavern, his only conscious thought to touch, to prove to himself that this is really Castiel. The loose stones underfoot slide and clatter, splashing into deeper pools of water as he goes, but Dean doesn’t look down.

His eyes are instead fixed on the mess of Castiel’s dark hair, the curve of his neck, his eyes that almost seem to glitter in the blue light. Somehow, the uneven floor allows Dean safe passage.

He could well be floating, he moves so fluidly.

Maybe he is.

Only when his hands come to rest against Castiel’s shoulders does Dean know what it is to be grounded, as though the gravity pull of Castiel’s touch is all it takes to keep him from spinning helplessly out into nothing. He has the absurd thought that this must be why they call it falling.

When Castiel smiles around his name, it seems wasteful not to fall a little further.

With one hand sliding into the hair at the back of Castiel’s head, Dean drops the other down to his waist and pulls him closer, closer than he’s been before and exactly where he’s wanted him for years. Castiel’s lips are warm; his hands against Dean’s chest are warmer. Dean feels dizzy and loose-limbed, his pulse racing harder from the contact than he can recall it doing in years.

It’s somewhere between the third and seventh kiss that Dean actually realizes what he’s doing, and while this isn’t exactly how he’d planned for this moment to go, he’s not about to stop.

Certainly not when Castiel is kissing him back with gusto, fingers tightening at Dean’s sides as he presses closer still, one bare foot bumping against Dean’s in the shallow water.

It’s somewhere around the tenth kiss that Dean remembers that he doesn’t actually know how long he’s been asleep, and that time in the dreamscape is about as slippery as it is in Hell. Reluctantly, he tilts his mouth away, letting out a soft hum when Castiel chases his movement to land another quick kiss against his lips.

“Did you feel the earth move?” Castiel asks before Dean can catch his breath, barely more than a murmur, and Dean pulls back to meet his eyes. They’re crinkled at the corners, like he’s proud of his terrible joke. He probably is.

Dean wants to smile back, but the memory of how scared he’d been is fresh, and the reminder of the earthquake does little to stop the feeling still trembling at his core. It doesn’t take long before Castiel notices. A wrinkle forms between his brows.

“You really thought I’d destroyed the grace,” he says, studying Dean, and Dean can only nod.

“When I heard about the earthquake, I--” Dean starts, cutting himself off to swallow around the lump in his throat. “Jesus, Cas. I was so fucking scared.”

“I promised you,” Castiel reminds him. Dean wishes that were enough.

“I guess we’ve both broken enough of those that I can’t help but worry anyway,” he admits, and fights off the broken shudder that tries to force its way through him when Castiel pulls him close to run his wide palm down over his spine.

“I’m sorry,” Castiel says, breathes against his ear.

The apology comes loaded with the weight of a thousand others; all the times they’ve lied and tricked and betrayed one another for the greater good, to save each other, to do what they thought was right.

“So am I,” Dean tells him, and takes a steadying breath, forcing a smile as he steps back and tries to lighten the mood. “I promised I’d wait until the 30th.”

Apparently sensing Dean’s desire to change the subject, Castiel smiles back.

“I’m actually glad you used the last feather tonight. Aside from the obvious reasons.”

“What are the obvious reasons?” Dean asks, and Castiel reaches back up to brush his thumb over Dean’s lips. Kissing it is the only reasonable course of action.

Castiel’s stuttered intake of breath at the gesture is thrilling in a way Dean can’t wait to explore out in the real world.

“You’re very distracting,” Castiel says after a moment, dragging his eyes back up to meet Dean’s. “Stop distracting me when I have important information to impart.”

“You do?”

Castiel nods, tugging his own lower lip between his teeth as he does, and the sight leaves Dean a little breathless.

“Then impart away,” he says, but Castiel’s hand is still curled around his jaw, and Dean can’t help but lean into it, tilting down a little to ghost his lips over Castiel’s wrist.

Castiel shuts his eyes as he reluctantly pulls his hand away, curling his fingers into a fist as though he’s trying to keep the sensation.

“I saw a sign,” he says after a moment, and Dean exhales slowly as he forces himself to focus on the topic at hand. “During the earthquake, the demons left us unattended, and I went to the extraction room. I saw a sign out the window.”

Castiel inclines his head a little, and Dean follows his eye line until he sees a small window open up in the glossy-wet cave wall a dozen feet away. Moving up close, he rests his hands on the damp wall to peer outside.

The view that awaits him is made up mostly of rocky earth and a distant mountain, peaked with snow. Closer though, a rusted chainlink fence, and there, just past it, a weatherbeaten sign.

**YO_ ARE NO_ LE___NG RAD_O _I_Y**

He squints at it for a moment, the letters scrambling before he solves it like one of the easier rounds on Wheel of Fortune.

“You are now leaving Radio City,” he says, and turns to Castiel, his mouth splitting into a grin he couldn’t stop if he tried.

“Do you know where that is?”

“No,” Dean says with a shake of his head as he glances back outside. “But Cas, this is--I think this is going to be enough. It’s a name. I can search a name.”

Castiel’s previously stiff shoulders seem to loosen, and he dips his head as he meets Dean’s eyes.

“I don’t want to... push my luck, so to speak,” he says, a slow smile pulling at one side of his mouth, “but I’m fairly certain a revelation of this magnitude should inspire more kissing.”

“Can’t argue with that,” Dean says, but as he leaves the window, crossing the cave to meet him in the middle, he misplaces his foot, submerging one leg up to the knee in dark water. Castiel catches his arm before he can fall, and Dean looks up at him, silhouetted against hundreds of tiny glowing lights that he now realizes are glow worms.

“Nice cave by the way,” Dean says, allowing himself to be pulled from the deep puddle.

“I agree. Zabo was quite proud of it,” Castiel answers matter-of-factly, and explains when Dean looks at him in question. “She’s one of the angels here. This network of caves was one of the last things she made on Earth before she was appointed the Angel of Creativity.”

Biting back his smile, Dean listens as Castiel goes on.

“She persuaded the sea to carry shells and animal bones to a particular point off the coast of what eventually became New Zealand,” Castiel says, pointing out a few shapes in the rock that must mean something to someone who knows what they’re looking at. Dean glances at them, but the far more interesting thing is the animated way Castiel is talking, gesturing with graceful fingers and lifting his brow when he says something he finds particularly interesting. “It all gathered on the ocean floor, and around fifteen million years later it was an enormous slab of limestone, moving around as the earth’s plates shifted, and then--what?”

Blinking, Castiel tilts his head.

“Nothing,” Dean says, unable to hold off his grin any longer. “It’s just good to see you.”

“I missed you too,” Castiel tells him, like he knows exactly what Dean meant.

 _Hell_ , Dean thinks. _He probably does_.

For a long moment, Castiel studies him.

“We should go somewhere,” he says eventually, tilting his head to the side as he looks at Dean, and Dean frowns.

“Maybe we should save the vacation planning for after we’ve found you,” he says. Castiel shakes his head.

“No, I mean-- I’ve been everywhere, more or less, and lucid dreaming is as close as I’m ever going to get to having full use of my wings again. So we should make use of it.” He pauses before adding; “As breathtaking as this cave is, I think I’d quite like to spend however much time we still have kissing you somewhere that doesn’t smell of damp.”

Despite the multiple kisses they’ve already shared since Dean found him here, hearing Castiel say that he wants to do it again for any extended period of time is enough to make Dean weak at the knees. His head spins, and he thinks, in a fit of utter idiocy, _I must be dreaming_. He fights off the hysterical laugh.

“Somewhere less underground would be good,” he finally manages to say, and between blinks, the cave is gone.

He’s halfway expecting Castiel to take them to some mountaintop or the Grand Canyon or the moon--but instead, they’re back in that dusty old house that seemed so familiar last time he dreamwalked with Castiel. He looks around, inspecting the water damage on the ceiling and the scuff-marked baseboards, before facing Castiel with a raised brow.

“You could take us anywhere, and this is where you chose?”

“You don’t recognize it?”

Stepping out of the dark kitchen, Dean lets his gaze roam around the adjoining living room where a spindly-legged table sits beneath the window, thin white curtains filtering moonlight and the silhouette of vines that grow on the wall outside. On the table is an unlit gas lantern and an ancient-looking urn, and Dean’s eyes widen a little when he realizes where they are.

“We stayed here,” Castiel says from close behind him, and Dean sucks in a surprised breath when he feels his arms wrapping around him, hands settling warm against his stomach. “You and I.”

“In Maine,” Dean agrees, and tilts his head to make room when Castiel presses an open-mouthed kiss to the juncture of his neck and shoulder before speaking quietly into his ear.

“If I recall correctly, you told me that you were making it your personal goal to ensure I would not die a virgin.”

Jesus. Dean gulps.

“I didn’t-- back then, I wasn’t-- not really,” he tries again, the words getting tangled as he stares down at Castiel’s hands and slides his own over them, weaving their fingers together. “I mean, I thought I was-- and you were--” He huffs out a breath and closes his eyes. “Cas, I’ve got no idea what I’m doing.”

“It’s alright,” Castiel tells him. “Neither do I.”

“For a guy who has no idea what he’s doing, you’re doing a damn good job of it,” Dean tells him, leaning back slightly to feel the solid warmth of Castiel’s chest against his back.

“I suppose there’s a lot to be said for instinct,” Castiel says, dragging his hands up over Dean’s chest as he kisses him again, lips soft beneath his ear and along the bolt of his jaw.

All at once it’s too much and not enough, and Dean turns in his arms, desperate for those lips to be on his own. He kisses him deeply, pulling him as close as he can so that their chests are flush, feet bumping together on the creaking floorboards.

Vaguely, he’s aware of Castiel pushing him backwards as they kiss. It’s not until his back hits the wall that he realizes how far they’ve moved. He leans his head against it, catching his breath.

Castiel looks better than ever; his hair wild and messy where Dean’s hands have been running through it, cheeks flushed, eyes hooded and bright. His lips are wet and pink from kissing, and Dean thinks _, I did that. I finally did that_.

“How did we get here?” he asks, staring, and Castiel counters immediately; “Why didn’t we get here sooner?”

“Hell if I know.”

Still leaning against the wall, Dean lifts one hand to touch his fingers to Castiel's throat, tracing down to the dip of his collarbone, chasing the thrum of his pulse below the skin where it disappears under gray cotton. It hurts, touching him like this. Having him so close while he’s still miles away. Dean closes his eyes.

“What’s wrong?” Castiel asks, and Dean feels him shifting, like he’s about to step away. He tightens his grip on his waist to keep him.

“What if I still can’t find you?” he asks, forcing his eyes back open. “What if this is another dead end?”

“Then you’ll pray,” Castiel says simply. “You’ll pray, and you’ll tell me what happened, and we’ll think of something.”

Holding his gaze, he presses his hand over Dean’s.

“And if we can’t,” he goes on, and Dean feels his jaw clenching with the need to deny it as a possibility. “If you don’t find me-- it’s okay. It won’t be your fault.”

“I don’t care whose fault it is,” Dean says. “You’ve been through too much, Cas. You deserve to be saved.”

Castiel half smiles at that, and Dean wonders if he recognizes the words. If he’d ever let that years old conversation play back in his mind the way Dean has, over and over again.

“Perhaps,” he says. “But it doesn’t always work that way. And you deserve to be content, even if that means letting me go.”

“Easier said than done,” Dean says with a rueful smile. “Every time you go it’s worse.”

He doesn’t even know how to begin to describe it. How it’s not so much a pit of grief that opens up in his chest as it is a black hole. How it’s as though everything he ought to feel just gets dragged into the darkness as it grows and grows, heavier with every passing day. How he convinces himself that hedonism will help but it never does; every drink, every fuck, every mindless pleasure he dives into does nothing but remind him that he can’t feel a damn thing.

He’s terrified of the thought of being numb again, but he’s not numb now. Right now, he feels more than he thinks he has the courage to admit. It makes him want to try.

“You know, right?” he asks, searching Castiel’s eyes as he tries to get the words out. “How I-- you know that I-- how much I--”

He grinds his teeth together, cursing himself for being this emotionally constipated. Castiel just strokes a thumb over his cheek and kisses him again, speaking soft as he pulls away, words forming against Dean’s lips.

“You don’t have to say it,” he says, and Dean knows he means it. Things could work out, and they could be together for decades, and Castiel would never ask him to say the words out loud.

Somehow, it just makes Dean more determined to push past his hang ups.

“I love you,” he says, his voice shaking more than he can bear to think about, and kisses him again immediately. He presses the words into Castiel’s mouth like he’s afraid they’ll float away if he doesn’t. The small, blissful sound Castiel makes in reply only makes him hold on tighter.

They’re still pressed together when, far too soon, the dream fades away.


	31. Radio City

 

Dean’s hands are trembling when he wakes, and after startling Sam awake by tripping over him on his way to the laptop--an incident that could have been avoided if Sam had been sleeping in his bed instead of slouching halfway out of a chair in the middle of the room--it takes three tries before he manages to type “RADIO CITY” ISLAND ALASKA into the search engine.

The very first result leads to a website on US Naval History that looks as though it was put together by a beginner blogger in the late nineties and promptly forgotten about, but there among the pictures they’ve posted is one marked Radio City, Adak AK - 1944. 

According to the website, it was the nickname given to a Naval Communications Station constructed on the tiny island during World War Two, and though the original Quonset huts were pulled down and replaced with solid buildings in the 60’s, the name stuck.

“Adak Island,” Sam reads aloud over his shoulder. “That was on the maybe list, right?”

“Yeah,” Dean says, a little breathless as he copies the co-ordinates into Google Earth. It’s only a few seconds before he’s zoomed in on a small cluster of buildings on the island.

Looking back at Sam, Dean can’t help but grin.

“This is it, Sam,” he says, and zooms out to get some idea of where Radio City actually is. Multiple photo links appear as he does so, showing tags like abandoned military complex and Naval Communications and deserted building. The further out he zooms, the more pictures pop up, and finally--

“There!” Dean points excitedly at a small body of water to the north of Radio City. “That must be the lake.”

When he zooms out even further, he’s relieved to see an airport, and he doesn’t waste any time tracking down the only airline offering service to the island. 

Unsurprisingly, the remote location means flights are scarce--only two are scheduled each week--and Dean groans when he sees that the next one is two days away.

“Didn’t I see Sandra give you her number?” Dean asks, recalling the mildly flustered look on Sam’s face when the pilot had pecked his cheek in parting. “Maybe she’d be willing to fly us?”

Sam shakes his head, two spots of color forming high on his cheeks at Dean’s mention of her.

“She’s visiting family in Manitoba this week,” he reminds him. “She was talking about it the whole flight back to St Paul, remember?”

“I guess I wasn’t paying attention. Maybe there’s some other way to get there.”

Though he tries every possible avenue he can think of, the only other way they’re going to get to the island (besides getting a boat themselves, and it quickly becomes obvious that nobody will be willing to rent one to two guys who clearly have no idea what they’re doing) is on the ferry. 

According to the woman he speaks to, it doesn’t run on any kind of regular schedule, but it’s taking a delivery of some kind nine days from now if they want to travel with the freight.

He thanks her, but ultimately declines, and books two seats on Thursday’s flight out of Anchorage.

Dean spends the rest of the morning in their motel room, reading up on the tiny island--closer to Russia than the Alaskan mainland and fewer than two hundred permanent residents--and sending brief prayers to Castiel whenever he finds something that might help if their rescue mission goes haywire.

“You know this place made the list of most dangerous airports in the world?” he says around half past eleven, staring at the laptop screen while Sam watches the Kansas City Royals kick Seattle’s ass on a TV rerun. “This website says you can see chunks of wrecked planes on the mountain at the end of the runway, Sam. Chunks. Multiple chunks.”

“Well it’s either fly or wait... what was it?” Sam says, glancing back at him. “A week for the ferry?”

“Nine days,” Dean corrects him. “And I wasn’t saying we shouldn’t fly. I’m just...”

“Stressing yourself out,” Sam says.

“Like I don’t have a good reason,” Dean replies, picking at the edge of the space bar. He chews his lip before bringing up the other thing that’s been bothering him. “So, I’ve been thinking. There’s eleven angels besides Cas, and it’s not like we can just stick them on a bus after we bust them out.”

“Right,” Sam says slowly, turning the volume down on the baseball game as he looks at his brother.

“So how the hell are we going to get them off the island?”

Sam switches the TV off completely.

“I mean,” Dean goes on, tapping his pen against the table in agitation. “There’s not going to be any record of them being there, and on an island this small it would be hard enough to come up with a story if we just had Cas to think about.”

“Maybe Thomas could help?” Sam suggests. “He’s got a boat, right?”

“Yeah, a trawler,” Dean says.

“So we’ll call him from the island if--” Sam starts, and cuts himself off, looking guiltily at Dean. “I mean--”

“No, you’re right,” Dean says, ignoring the crawling cold feeling that comes over him at the thought that they might not get there in time. “We’ll call him when we need him.”

The rest of the day passes in much the same way, and by the following morning, after managing only a few hours of sleep, Dean sits on the edge of his bed trying not to count the remaining hours until their flight.

“Dude, this is so frustrating,” he says loudly, and the bathroom door opens to reveal Sam in his pajamas, brushing his teeth. “Cas is just... he’s right there, and we’re just stuck sitting here.”

Dean rubs his face with his hands and lets out an irritated sigh.

“So let’s find something to do,” Sam says through a mouthful of toothpaste.

“Like what?” Dean asks, and Sam disappears back into the bathroom for a moment. 

“Everything’s good to go. Weapons are cleaned and ready, we know where we’re going and what we’re doing, and we more or less know what we’re up against. There’s no prep or research left.”

Sam shrugs, re-emerging sans-toothbrush and pushing a hand through his sleep-tangled hair, somehow fixing it instantly. 

“There was a sign for Walmart not too far from here,” he suggests, and Dean pulls a face.

“You want to go shopping?”

Sam shoots him a withering look as he digs through his bag.

“For Cas, genius. Remember what Adaeoet was wearing when we found him?”

“Right,” Dean says. “Cas has been wearing the same thing whenever I’ve dreamwalked with him. He doesn’t even have shoes.” 

“The others are all going to need coats and shoes, too,” Sam points out.

He’s got a point. Even if the angels still have enough grace left over to keep themselves going in the cold weather, a dozen confused people in prison pajamas are going to be ever harder to move off the island without raising a few red flags than they will be already, and there’s no way that the two of them have enough spare clothes to lend to that many people.

A trip to Walmart doesn’t exactly make time pass faster, but it’s a distraction, and for that Dean is grateful.


	32. Time

 

There’s a countdown in Castiel’s head; Dean’s voice telling him we’re flying in twelve hours, eleven hours, ten hours, nine. He clings to the numbers desperately.

In the days since the dream, the demons have taken more and more grace, draining every angel almost to the final drop, and he knows that whenever Dean and Sam arrive it’s going to be a close call.

When the lights come on at four o’clock on Thursday morning, Castiel feels even weaker than usual. More tired. However much grace he has left, it’s barely a wisp, and he can’t help but worry that the demons are close enough to whatever target they’ve set that they don’t care about keeping them alive. His entire body aches.

In the hall he can hear heavy footsteps, and Godric’s strange, lilting voice calling out that it’s time for extraction. The fact that he’s present is only another reason to be worried.

When Glma tells Godric that today is his extraction free day, Godric simply replies “Not anymore,” and sends him to the front of the line. Odatt follows, and then Castiel. He’s in the chair for an hour. 

They take even more grace than usual. A lot more. Whatever they are planning, it is going to happen soon. As he makes his way out, holding onto the wall for support until Aloai offers him assistance, Sullivan calls Baradiel forward with a sharp, “You’re up, 2-03.”

“No.”

Castiel staggers to a stop, turning to look back at Baradiel in shock.

Her vessel is an old woman with papery white skin that’s thin enough to see the veins on her hands, and though her voice is as rough and rumbly as the thunderstorms she once presided over, it isn’t often that she uses it. It’s even rarer for her to raise it. 

Now, though, she’s furious.

“I will not go willingly into that room,” she says, lifting her chin as she meets Sullivan’s shocked eyes head on, voice getting louder and louder. “Whatever you’re taking you’re taking too much, and I will not-- I will not--”

Sullivan takes hold of her arm, dragging her forward, and the others watch in shock as she rages, fighting as much as her old bones will allow. Castiel is too weak to help her. The others, he thinks, seem too frightened to try.

He hears from Zedekiel that she was carried out of the extraction room by Ikenna over an hour later, body limp and even paler than before. 

“There was blood,” Zedekiel adds, leaning close to whisper. “I think they killed her on purpose.”

Nobody saw where she was taken, but she isn’t the last.

By the time Dean prays to tell him that they’ve arrived on the island, Aloai, Pado and Bataivah are lost as well. The demons are at the final stages of whatever they’re planning, and they no longer care to be cautious. They’re taking all they can, and disposing of what’s left.

He sees the remaining angels, their skin waxy, their eyes dull, and decides that he can’t wait any longer. He has to do something, or it won’t matter if Sam and Dean break the doors down in the morning. They might not last that long.


	33. Adak

 

To Dean’s relief, the plane to Adak is a Boeing 737, and they board via a bridge from their gate without once stepping foot on the tarmac. When he takes his seat and glances out the window, there are no propellers in sight.

“Awesome,” he says to himself, and Sam looks at him with raised brows from across the aisle.

“Dude,” he says.

“What?”

“You’re actually getting used to this, aren’t you?”

Considering it for a moment, Dean shrugs.

“I’ve been on five--now six planes in the past two weeks,” he says. “I still don’t like them, but there’s only so much panicking I can do.”

Within an hour he’s decided that the words were a mistake; a self-inflicted curse at the very least, considering how turbulent the flight is. He’s glad the near-empty plane means he’s got two seats to himself with Sam across the center aisle, staring out the window. Those precious few feet mean that his brother misses most of Dean’s freaking out. The less supportive _just breathe, Dean’_ s he has to hear in his life, the better.

By some miracle, they land unscathed. Solid ground has never felt better, even if it’s windy enough to have Dean squinting and leaning as he walks.

The rental they pick up outside the airport is a behemoth of a Ford truck with an engine almost as loud as the plane they came in on. It’s in good condition, if a little dinged-up around the bumper, and Dean is relieved beyond measure when the first thing Norm tells them as he climbs out is that the heater is in working order.

Norman Lee is a fifty-something jack of all trades who apparently takes care of everything from the airport to the wiring in everyone’s houses, and he’s chattier than he looks as he pulls open the back for them to throw in their bags.

“What brings you fellas out here?”

“Caribou, mostly,” Sam says, accepting the keys that Norm hands him as they close the back of the truck.

“It’s a hell of a place to hunt ‘em,” Norm says.

“You hunt often?” Dean asks him, and he nods, yanking down on his ball cap.

“Not a whole lot else to do out here in your spare time,” he says with a toothy grin. “You let me know if you need a guide out there. I’ve lived here longer’n I haven’t, so I know my way around.”

“Will do,” Sam promises.

“You wouldn’t happen to know much about the old military buildings, would you?” Dean asks as they move to climb into the truck. “Just, our grandpa was stationed out here in the 40’s, and I’d love to check them out.”

“Well, there’s a few places,” Norm says, squinting in the glare of sun where it reflects off the rainslick asphalt. “You know what he did?”

“He used to talk about Radio City,” Sam says.

“Oh, well,” Norm frowns. “That’s about four, five miles north of town. It all got boarded up years ago--officially unsafe but people still went in there—but back in March some military officials flew in. Said they were cleaning up the place, and that anyone caught trespassing would be... ah, what did they say? Prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”

Norm shrugs.

“Doesn’t look like they’ve done all that much when you drive past, but they’re still around. They come into town from time to time, keep to themselves mostly, but any extra patrons at the bar are welcome in a town this small.”

“Do they stay in town?” Sam asks, and Norm scratches his beard.

“No, I’m pretty sure they all live out there.” 

“What did they look like?” Dean asks, and when Norm sends him a strange look he grins. “Just, if I see them I’d love to try my luck, see if they might let us have a look around.” 

“I wouldn’t count on it,” Norm says, scrunching up his nose. “But one of them has red hair, real curly. You’d see her from a mile off.”

“I’ll keep an eye out,” Dean tells him.

“Alright,” Norm smiles, thumping the hood of the truck with his knuckles. “I’ll leave you boys to it. You need anything while you’re here, don’t hesitate to call.”

With that Norm heads back to the building by the airport, and Dean climbs into the passenger seat, yanking the door closed before checking the map he’d printed out before they left and directing Sam toward the short-term rental they’d booked for their time here.

Outside, there’s not much to see but waist high grass and rocks, a few small bushes dotted here and there.

_Cas_ , he prays as they follow the road around a wide bend. _We’re about five miles south of Radio City. If we don’t get to you tonight, we will by morning. I’ll let you know when we’re close, okay? Hold on._

There’s a woman waiting for them at the rental house, short and stocky with a wide smile and brown hair that’s been cropped short, and she waves cheerfully as they pull up in the driveway.

“Afternoon!” she calls as they climb out. “You must be Sam and Dean.”

“Katenka, right?” Sam asks, shaking her offered hand, and she beams.

“Call me Kate,” she says, and directs them inside.

The house is more than a little oversized--four bedrooms and a living room big enough for three couches--and as Kate shows them around, starting with the garage which she requests they use for any and all game they bring back from their hunting trips, she mentions that usually they get bigger hunting groups.

“It’s definitely roomy,” Sam agrees.

Dean is relieved when she leaves. He unlocks the suitcase containing the shotgun, checking it over while Sam does the same with the others.

“What time is sunset here?” he asks, looking around for the bag with the empty casings so he can fill them with rock salt from the bag in the garage.

“Not until about eleven,” Sam says, glancing at his watch. “We’ve got about four more hours of daylight.”

“Awesome,” Dean says, locating the bag.

“You want to go tonight?”

“Yeah,” Dean says. “You don’t?”

“I think we should scope out the place first,” he says, which Dean knows is a reasonable thing to want to do. Dean doesn’t feel particularly reasonable right now.

“That just gives them time to realize we’re here,” he says.

“Yeah, you’ve got a point,” Sam says.

“So I say we get our gear ready ASAP, and haul ass. You game?”

“I’ll be ready when you are,” Sam says.

It takes about forty-five minutes to get a decent amount of salt rounds loaded, and while he’s doing it he keeps one eye on his map, figuring out the best route. Sam is busy carving tiny devil’s traps into the bullets for their handguns.

“We’re going to have to take the last mile or so by foot,” Dean says, tamping down the salt on the final round. “Otherwise anyone who’s looking from Radio City is gonna see us coming.”

“We can’t just leave the car anywhere, though,” Sam says as he looks up from his work. “It’ll not exactly inconspicuous.”

Putting down the knife he’s been using to carve devil’s traps, Sam comes to look at the map, pointing out a bend in the road.

“How about we drive to here, you can jump out and start making your way toward the buildings from the south, and I can drive back down here--” he swipes his finger along the map. “Take the road around the lake to the other side to approach from the north-east. I can hide the truck behind those buildings.”

With a nod, Dean finishes off the last salt round.

“Sounds good,” he says, and pushes to his feet. “You ready?”


	34. Extraction

 

It’s a little after eight o’clock in the evening when Castiel gets his chance.

For hours he’s been sitting in his cell, waiting for his body to recover from the extraction as much as possible before he slept, and listening to the comings and goings of Min, Ikenna, Sullivan and Godric. With extractions taking so much longer than usual, the last angel didn’t return to the cells until a few minutes ago, and he knows that at two of the demons will now be on their way out of the building to take the newly extracted grace to the place they’ve been storing it.

From previous days, he knows it will be around an hour until they return. He just hopes he’ll be lucky enough to quickly locate the remaining two.

The sound of Sullivan’s approaching footsteps has never been better. He waits until she’s right outside his cell, noisily checking that each angel is where they should be, before he makes a loud shhh sound, followed by what he hopes is a convincing laugh and the words, “Be quiet.”

It works like a charm.

Sullivan looks in at him with pursed lips.

“What are you doing, 4-01?”

“No-one,” he says, deliberately contorting his face into the one that Sam had once told him made him a terrible liar and glancing quickly at the space behind the door. “I mean, nothing.”

Narrowing her eyes, she steps through the door to look behind it, and Castiel makes his move.

Leaping forward, he pins her arms to her sides and pulls. Letting his body grow limp, he throws off her balance and she stumbles another half step into the room, where she stops as though hitting a brick wall. Castiel lets go and steps back, and she turns to look at him, fury in her eyes as she tries in vain to move closer.

A drop of blood falls from the ceiling, hitting her square on the nose. Disgusted, she wipes it away before looking up to see the devil’s trap he’d drawn there less than half an hour ago, balanced precariously on the small stack of books he’s accumulated in his cell.

“You’re gonna regret that,” she tells him, looking back at him, her eyes flicking to black as she reaches for her pocket. She pats at it, frowning. Castiel raises a hand to show her the cell phone she’s looking for and she tries again to move forward.

“I regret a lot of things,” he tells her. “Sending you back to hell isn’t going to be one of them.”

“What, you think you’ve got the juice to smite me?” she laughs, and it’s an ugly thing.

“I don’t need it.”

“You’re not getting out of this building.”

Castiel doesn’t see the point in responding to that.

“Exorcizamus te,” he starts, and she bares her teeth, black eyes flashing.

“Ikenna will kill you before you’ve reached the ground floor,” she says, but she actually looks scared now, as though she’s finally realized that she’s lost all control of the situation.

“Omnis immundus spiritus,” he goes on, and the first wisps of black smoke begin to curl out of her mouth. “Omnis satanica potestas, omnis incursio infernalis adversarii, omnis legio, omnis congregatio et secta diabolica.”

She lets out a scream, agonized and furious, and he rushes to finish the exorcism before Ikenna hears.

“Ergo, draco maledicte. Ecclesiam tuam securi tibi facias libertate servire, te rogamus, audi nos.”

As the last of the smoke leaves her, her body convulses, back arching and lifting her to her toes before she crumples. He catches her just in time. At her throat, he feels a thready pulse.

Carefully, he moves the young woman Sullivan had been possessing onto his mattress and checks her pockets, finding them empty save for a set of keys. He takes them, clutching them in his palm--still stinging from where he’d used the glass from the extraction room window to draw blood for the devil’s trap--and heads for the door, freezing when he finds Odatt and Glma staring in at him.

Glma’s eyes slowly track down to the unconscious woman before lifting back to Castiel, wide with fear.

“What was that smoke?” Glma asks.

“Is Sullivan dead?” Odatt asks, taking a half step into the room to look more closely.

“She’ll be okay,” Castiel glances back at her with a frown. “I think she’ll be okay,” he amends, and steps past them into the hallway.

“4-01?” another voice asks, and he looks to find Levanael watching warily from the doorway to her cell. The other angels are likely still too exhausted from extraction to have bothered to get up, but the three sets of eyes now staring at him are as alert as any of them have been since they’ve been here. He knows he has to tell the three of them something, but he doubts that they’re going to believe him with just a quick explanation, and he’s short on time.

“Did you hear what happened to 2-03 today?” he asks them, and they all nod, wide eyed. He takes a breath. “The same thing happened to 2-06, 3-04 and 4-02. And it’s going to happen to all of us if we don’t get out of here.”

“But we’re monsters,” Odatt states plainly. “We can’t leave. We could hurt someone.”

“Do you want to hurt someone?”

“Of course not,” Odatt says.

“Then how could you be a monster?”

“They cured us,” Glma says. “They’ve been taking the evil from us, and making us better.”

“Then why would they kill us when they’ve succeeded?” Castiel says, and the three angels frown at once, all considering his point. “They’ve been manipulating us. They’ve taken our identities, and lied to us, and now that they have what they want they’re killing us.”

“I don’t want to hurt anyone,” Levanael says, still leaning heavily on her door frame. “I don’t want anyone to die.”

“Then help me,” Castiel says, worried they’ll refuse. But Levanael nods, and a moment later the others follow.

Castiel is quiet on the stairs, moving as swiftly as he can until he reaches the top where he pauses to listen. Down the hall in the direction of the sigil-guarded exit to the right, he hears the faint tap-tap-tap of Ikenna doing something on his phone as he paces, presumably making sure no angels attempt to sneak out.

Castiel takes a deep breath before he turns left, hurrying toward the extraction room.

It isn’t locked--why would it be, when it’s such a source of dread for anyone but the demons?--and he closes the door gently behind him before moving to the metal cart that holds the extraction needle. He slips it into the waistband of his pants before making his way back to the door and pressing one ear to it, listening for passersby.

As fast as his legs will allow, Castiel makes his way toward the mess hall and ducks inside. Out in the hall, he hears the shouting begin. It echoes up from the cells downstairs, and he stays pressed to the wall, silent and still until he hears Ikenna’s boots thumping down the hallway.

With his eyes pressed closed he waits, hoping that Glma, Levanael and Odatt have followed his instructions to the letter. When he hears Ikenna pass and descend the stairs he doesn’t waste a moment in heading back out into the hall, running for the exit with all he has.

When he nears the point where the sigils stop him in his tracks he slows, taking a deep breath, and takes out the extraction needle. It won’t hurt any less when he uses it on himself, but his method will be faster.

When the demons extract, they work slowly. They press the needle in, drawing out the grace little by little like a nurse taking blood from a vein, and do so to ensure that the angel doesn’t lose it all at once.

Castiel, on the other hand, wants it all out. Now.

Using the needle as a knife, he draws it sharply over the skin of his throat, praying that his aim is accurate enough and his cut shallow enough to miss any major arteries. The pain of it burns, boils, blisters, and he bites down on his other hand to keep from screaming.

As his grace pours out, spreading up toward the ceiling, he hears Dean in his head. A prayer. The last prayer he’ll hear.

_We’re on our way._

Collapsing against the wall, his vision swims for a moment, and he drops the syringe to the floor. The glass barrel shatters as the last of his grace twists from his throat, dissipating rapidly.

The silence after is shocking in its depth, and he worries he’s lost his hearing completely until he realizes he’s simply missing the constant hum of the universe that comes with being an angel.

Humanity is never easy to adjust to. He doesn’t have time to dwell.

Still, he breathes for a moment, dazed from the lingering pain, and presses his palm to his throat where he feels blood oozing slowly from the wound. It’s superficial, and unless he moves his neck in a truly excessive way it doesn’t pose any real threat to his life.

Distantly, he can hear Ikenna shouting. It’s enough to snap him back into focus.

He staggers forward over the sigils in the floor, weak and human but blessedly unaffected by their magic. With all the strength his exhausted body has left he throws himself at the door. It doesn’t budge.

“No, no--” he starts, slamming his palms flat against it until he remembers the keys he took from Sullivan. They’re still wedged into the waistband of his pants, digging into his skin. He takes them out, trying one after another, again, again, until finally--four keys in--the lock slides free with a heavy click.

“Thank you,” he breathes out to the world at large, and shoves the door open, stumbling outside.

Sunlight is not the golden thing he remembers.

Even through the heavy cloud overhead it stings, makes his eyes water with its brightness. He only spares a couple of seconds to locate it in the sky, turning in a circle to determine which way is north. As soon as he knows, he moves again, running deeper into the scattered empty buildings that make up Radio City.

The wind blasts across the tundra behind him, whipping dirt around his bare ankles and pushing his thin shirt up to leave frigid trails on his stomach, and he hears a deep voice shout out from back by the doorway, all but muffled by the wind.

His stomach turns at the realization that Ikenna would have killed the others after breaking out of the trap. _I should never have left them,_ he thinks, but it’s too late to go back. He has to get to the place where the grace has been taken; has to stop Min and Godric from whatever they’re doing. His lungs burn as he runs faster, not stopping to look back as he turns sharply into a gap between buildings, ducking in and out of shadow.

Under his feet, the cracked asphalt is jagged and slippery with recent rain, and his heels slam against it, pound with every pace. He skids. Stumbles. Hits the ground hard, hands stinging, bones aching in the cold. The blood on his hands is hot, running down his arms in red rivulets.

Dirt fills the cuts on his palms. It stings.

He runs, he runs, he runs.


	35. Power Trip

 

Standing by the stairs with folded arms, Min taps her toe against the stained concrete floor of the bunker. It has relatively small floor space--only around thirty feet deep and not much wider--but the ceiling is high, and hundreds of vials of grace surround them. In its heyday, this place held nuclear weapons. In a way, not much has changed.

Kneeling in the center of the room, head bowed chin to chest, Godric flexes his hands and hums in appreciation of some response that Min cannot detect. This whole process that Godric calls ‘communing with the grace’ usually only takes ten minutes, but they’ve already been here for almost half an hour. She hopes this means he’s going to tell her they have enough. That they can finally leave this island and the last few angels, and descend to Hell with the power to overthrow the king. 

After another few minutes, she clears her throat sharply. Godric opens his eyes slowly, as though waking from a deep sleep, and tilts his head to look at her.

“Is it enough?” she asks, and he looks to the ceiling, closing his eyes again as he lifts his arms. Around them, the grace seems to hum a little louder.

“It is,” he says after a moment.

Min stops tapping her foot and takes a hesitant step forward, moving to slip her phone from her pocket.

“Should I have Ikenna and Sullivan drain the last of the angels, or just kill them? Either way won’t take long.”

“Drain them,” Godric says, rising to his feet and rolling up the sleeve on his left arm just as Min’s cell starts buzzing in her hand. She glances at the screen.

“It’s Ikenna,” she frowns, accepting the call. “What is it?”

“They’re remembering,” Ikenna says, and Min’s eyes dart toward Godric as she puts the phone on speaker. “I’m not sure who the first was, but they-- one of them knew to draw a devil’s trap.”

“You got yourself trapped?” Min asks, incredulous. She can almost hear Ikenna grinding his teeth in response.

“I’m outside the cells,” he says. “From what I can tell they’re all still down here, but they don’t seem to remember much else.”

“So have Sully break the trap,” Min says.

“Sullivan isn’t answering her phone.”

Squeezing the bridge of her nose, Min looks at Godric.

“Is it worth going back?”

“What?” Ikenna asks. “Are you joking?”

“There are only eight angels left,” Godric says, considering. “And they won’t have replenished much grace since their last extractions.”

“Are you seriously talking about leaving me here?” Ikenna asks. They both ignore him. 

Godric looks around the room at the glowing light.

“If it’s only going to be you and I, we can certainly do without the few vials worth we could extract from them,” he says with a nod. He looks back at Min. “Leave them.”

“You son of a--”

Min ends the call, cutting Ikenna’s voice off before he can finish.

“What do you need me to do?”

Moving to the back of the room, Godric pulls a small case out from under one of the shelves of grace. He flips it open to reveal an assortment of glass bottles, filled with oils and the blood of unknown creatures, a long, silvery angel sword, and a collection of ragged, brownish-gray feathers that appear singed at their edges.

He picks one up, stroking its length with a kind of reverence that makes Min strangely uneasy.

“I need you to kneel before the grace,” he says, placing the feather back in the box before he picks up a silver bowl, engraved all over with what Min recognizes as Enochian sigils. “And I need you to swear your fealty.”


	36. Pulse

 

Beyond the road, past a wide expanse of rocky ground, is a gray brick building, standing at the forefront of around a dozen more. At a distance, he can see bricks of a darker shade covering the spaces where windows used to be. Dean approaches it slowly, his gun held at his hip as he picks his way across the tundra.

He feels exposed here. The complete lack of trees on the island makes sneaking up on anyone next to impossible, and he only hopes that Sam has better luck staying out of sight. As it is, Dean doesn’t have much choice. He can either approach as he is, or give up.

Breathing steadily through his nose, he presses onward.

He’s still a good fifty yards away when he hears a door slam open, and he casts his gaze toward the right side of the building just in time to see a familiar figure stagger out into the light and take off running, barefoot and dressed in pale gray hospital scrubs. Dean doesn’t even think before he shouts.

“Cas!”

At the sound of his voice, Castiel falters, stumbling, but doesn’t stop. Doesn’t turn. If anything he runs faster, and Dean feels his heart pound hard.

“Shit,” Dean says, and looks toward the building. There doesn’t seem to be anyone else coming, but he keeps his eye on it anyway as he breaks into a sprint, following Castiel into the shadows of the crumbling buildings. By the time he reaches the last corner he saw Castiel move behind, he’s gone. There’s nothing but open ground and water to the east, and half a dozen buildings to the west.

“Come on,” he murmurs, sending out a silent prayer. _Little hard to kiss you hello when you’re hiding from me, Cas._

Breathing heavily, Dean pivots on his heel, looking for any sign of him. When he sees a bloody footprint on the stones outside a pale green door of a building nearby, he darts toward it, still moving quietly. He keeps his gun at the ready, just in case.

Pressing his ear to the door, he listens for movement inside before slowly turning the handle.

The door opens noisily, and he winces at the sound of its rusty hinges before taking out his flashlight to shine through the gap. There’s a flash of pale fabric as he passes the light around the room, and Dean lowers the gun, clicking the safety on.

“Cas,” he whispers as he steps inside, pulling the door closed behind him as he moves further into the room. “Cas?”

There’s no answer at first; just the quiet shuffle of bare feet on old carpet in the next room. It’s lighter there; a grimy window letting in just enough sunlight to see by. Dean moves toward it.

“Cas,” he repeats, a little louder. “It’s me.”

“Dean?”

Dean is so relieved at the sound of his voice that he could cry, but the relief is short-lived. As he steps into the room, he sees him leaning heavily against an old desk, blood staining the neckline of his shirt. His head his hanging forward, as if he’s barely managing to keep himself awake, and Dean hurries across the room toward him, capturing his face in his hands.

He’s a little pale--to be expected considering how long he’s been kept indoors--but to Dean’s

surprise he’s not emaciated. Whatever the demons were doing to him, they were at least keeping him well fed and rested. Dean figures it’s the one upside to this whole thing. The downsides? Dean’s lost count.

“Hey, hey, Cas--” he says, trying to hold his gaze. “You with me?”

“Dean,” he says again, slumping forward a little. “I’m okay.”

“What happened?” Dean asks him, trying to see where the blood came from and finding only a small, shallow cut. “Is this--”

“I cut it out.”

“You--”

“The grace,” Castiel says, and his hand lifts to touch the barely-visible cut on his throat that Dean is relieved to see has stopped bleeding. “I cut it out. I had to, to get past the sigils.”

“You’re human again?” Dean asks, eyes widening, and Castiel gulps visibly before he nods.

“I’m sorry.”

“Why the hell are you--” Dean cuts himself off with a shake of the head. There’s time for a discussion about self worth later. Right now, he’s got other priorities. “Where else are you hurt?”

“It’s not imp--”

“It is important,” Dean tells him. “I can tell you’re hurt or you wouldn’t be leaning on the desk like that. So.”

Castiel takes a breath.

“Just my foot,” he says, lifting his right foot a little and obviously only admitting it under sufferance. “I think I--”

Dean doesn’t wait for the rest of the sentence to come. He just kneels, lifting Castiel's foot into his lap, checking the skin for any sign of injury, running his fingers over the ankle to check for swelling. He works quickly, frantically, and by the time Castiel finishes saying “just twisted it,” he crumples forward to rest his forehead against Castiel's knee, one hand curled around his calf as he breathes out his relief.

“I’m mostly just tired,” Castiel says. “But I’m okay.”

"You're okay," Dean says. "It's okay. You're okay."

Castiel's hand is warm against the side of his face, and for a moment Dean can't look up. He's too overwhelmed. He presses his cheek against his leg, eyes closed, and kisses the side of his knee. Castiel's fingers curl in the hair behind his ear.

"I can't believe I found you.”

When he looks up, Castiel tilts forward to kiss him, his wide palms framing Dean’s face, thumbs stroking over his cheeks. Shuffling forward on his knees, Dean grips his thighs as he kisses back fiercely.

It would be easy to lose himself in this moment. Castiel pulls him back to the present as he pulls away.

“We have to help the others,” he says, hands still warm on Dean’s face. “Whatever the demons are planning, they’re doing it soon.”


	37. Burning Man

 

Despite Castiel’s insistence that he’s fine, Dean makes him wait before they head back outside.

After Dean sends a quick message to Sam to let him know where they are, Castiel uses the time to fill him in on the events of the past few hours.

“Do they know what they are?” Dean asks.

Castiel shakes his head.

“There was never a safe time to tell them. If I’d tried and they’d reacted badly, the demons always kept us too weak to do anything, and there’s no way we’d be able to keep from being crowned again.”

“So how did they--”

“I drew the trap myself before I left them,” Castiel says. “There wasn’t time to explain anything, but they’d seen enough by then to believe me when I told them what it was for. I told them to wait five minutes after I went upstairs, and then start shouting until Ikenna ran down.”

“Nice thinking, Cas.”

“I’d thought-- for a moment, earlier when you shouted to me. The wind was too loud, and I didn’t realize it was you. I thought he’d broken out somehow. I was sure he’d killed them.”

“So we’ll go take care of him first,” Dean says, and his phone buzzes with a message from Sam.

“Sam’s almost to the north edge of the buildings,” Dean tells him as he reads it. “You good to walk now?”

“I’ve been good to walk since you got here.”

Dean rolls his eyes.

“You’re worse than me,” he says.

Rising from his seat on the edge of the desk, Castiel tests his weight on the twisted ankle and feels a slight twinge. It’s bearable. He looks over at Dean.

“I really am okay,” he says on the off chance that Dean will actually believe him this time. “And regardless, we don’t have time to waste. We need to deal with Ikenna, and if we wait much longer Min and Godric will get there before we do.”

Side by side, they move toward the door and wait for Sam’s knock. Castiel glances at Dean’s profile in shadow, fumbling a little as he searches for his hand. When he finds it, he catches it in his own to squeeze it, and feels his heart ache with something warm and breath-catching when he sees Dean dip his head and smile.

“I realize this is a little delayed,” he says quietly, leaning a little closer. “But I want to make sure you know that I love you, too.”

Dean’s hand tightens around his, and he lets out a loud breath. Castiel runs his thumb over his fingers.

“We woke up too soon for me to say it when you did.”

Dean’s hands are sliding around his waist before Castiel has even finished speaking, and his kiss is deep and bruising. Castiel feels like his heart is going to burst out of his chest. Suddenly, that hunt he’d helped the Winchester’s on last year makes a lot more sense to him.

They’re still entwined when the sound of knuckles drumming on the door cuts through the quiet, and they pull apart, breathless and flushed, just in time for Sam to push it open.

“Guys?” he whispers.

“We’re here,” Dean says, his voice coming out a little strange, and Castiel can only assume that it’s because of the kissing. He’s oddly thrilled by the thought.

“Hello, Sam,” he says, and recognizes a similar quality in his own voice.

Stepping into the building, Sam grins widely and pulls him into a tight hug, thumping his back before he pulls away.

“Damn, it’s good to see you,” he says, still grinning. “You okay?”

“I’m okay.”

“He’s not, but he’s being stubborn,” Dean says. Castiel glares at him.

Sam snorts.

“Takes one to know one, I guess,” he says. “So what’s the plan?”

They can hear Ikenna as soon as they step inside the building, hollering at the angels that they’ll regret trapping him while they shout back an endless slew of accusations and demands. It’s a relief to hear. Min and Godric must not have returned yet.

“Well they sound like they’re doing okay,” Dean says as they run further into the building.

They see Ikenna as soon as they reach the bottom of the stairs, standing in the center of a devil’s trap in a patch of shadow, a shattered bulb overhead. He turns sharply when he hears them, eyes glittering black. When he sees Castiel, he sneers.

“You’re in a lot of trouble, 4-01,” he says. “When Godric and Min get back--”

“He’s lying,” Zedekiel says from the doorway to her cell, where Levanael and Glma stand behind her, peering out into the hallway. “He called them not long after you left and they’re leaving him here. Look.”

She points at the floor further up the hall, where the shattered remains of a cell phone are scattered.

“He threw a tantrum,” Odatt says from another door, holding Zabo, who is staring vaguely into space and intermittently reaching out toward them with one hand. “Shh, 1-06. It’s okay. 4-01 brought help, like he said he would.”

Ikenna snarls.

“If you think you’re getting out of here--” he starts, and Dean cocks his shotgun.

“You’re awful mouthy for a guy who’s about to get his face shot full of rocksalt,” he says, and Ikenna narrows his eyes. “What do you want with the grace?”

“Why the hell would I tell you?”

“You’re not leaving this trap either way,” Sam says.

“And it sounds like they screwed you over,” Dean adds with a shrug. “Seems like screwing ‘em right back would be satisfying, but maybe that’s just me.”

Ikenna considers this for a moment before lifting his chin.

“Go ahead,” he says. “I’d rather die than help a hunter.”

He still screams when Dean exorcises him. It’s an ear-splitting sound, echoing loud and bouncing off the walls. Zabo joins in halfway through, scared and thrashing as Odatt tries to calm her down.

It’s over within a few minutes, and the man he’d been possessing slumps onto the ground in a heap. Sam darts forward to check for a pulse.

“He’s alive,” he says, just in time for someone to stumble out another door. Castiel glances over, shocked to see the young woman Sullivan had been possessing is already on her feet. She stares at them all with wide eyes.

“Not--” she manages to say, shuddering from head to toe as she lifts her hands defensively at the sight of the guns. “I’m n-- not--”

“It’s alright,” Castiel tells her. “Sullivan is gone, now. Ikenna too.”

“What’s your name?” Sam asks.

“Alice,” she stutters out after a few attempts, still shivering, and Sam grabs the blanket from the floor to wrap around her shoulders.

“We’re gonna get you out of here, okay Alice?” Dean says, and looks around at the others.

“We’re getting you all out of here. But you’re gonna have to sit tight a little longer, just until we can take care of the other two.”

They all nod, and Dean exhales loudly.

“Alright,” he says and holds out his shotgun. “Any takers?”

“I’ll do it,” Zedekiel says, stepping forward, and he quickly shows her the basics.

“You see anyone come down those stairs who tries to avoid the devil’s trap, you shoot. Got it?”

“Yes,” she says, nodding with solemn conviction. “I got it.”

They leave shortly after, having moved the unconscious body that used to hold Ikenna into one of the cells, and head back out into the cold wind. Overhead, the sky is slowly shifting into the dusty orange of sunset. Castiel feels an unpleasant pit in his stomach.

“They’ve been gone far too long,” he says as the three of them hurry through the empty streets, heading north. “It’s normally no more than an hour.”

“How long have they been gone?” Sam asks.

“Almost two,” Castiel says. “If they decided to just abandon Ikenna and Sullivan, they must be ready for whatever they’re planning.”

It’s all that needs to be said. As one, they run faster.

The lake comes into view within about fifteen minutes, and just before it is a mound of earth, a flat-roofed gray brick bunker protruding from the side, half buried. There’s a metal door at either end. Blue light seeps out through the cracks of the one to the left.

“There,” Castiel says, pointing, and they push themselves faster. Pain shoots through his ankle in protest. He ignores it with gritted teeth.

They slow when they get close, and in some silent agreement they all veer to the door on the right. Unsurprisingly, it’s locked. Sam pulls a lock pick from his pocket and makes fast work of coaxing it open.

Inside, the first room smells musty and damp, and it’s dark enough that they can barely make out the few pieces of furniture scattered around. They move through the room slowly, Sam with the demon knife, Dean and Castiel each holding an angel blade at the ready. Finally, they reach a door at the far left side. Castiel presses an ear to it, and, hearing nothing on the other side, turns the handle.

To his relief, the door opens smoothly.

The next room is more of the same, but when they reach the next door they can see light at the bottom, and hear a low voice echoing. Sam moves away from where he’d been listening.

“Sounds like a stairwell,” he whispers.

Carefully, he opens the door in small increments. On the other side is a small landing with stairs running down to the right, and straight ahead is a door leading to a narrow steel-mesh walkway, suspended over the room below.

At the center of the room, floating in an incomprehensible sphere, the grace glows blue-white and blinding. The voice is louder now, chanting the same thing over and over. Castiel can’t quite hear the words, but every now and then he catches something familiar.

Quietly, they move out onto the landing, and Sam makes some hand gesture that Castiel translates as _I’ll go downstairs_ , _you take the walkway_. Dean nods back, and Sam grips the demon knife in his hand as he starts down the staircase, treading lightly. Dean glances at Castiel, his eyes dropping quickly to his mouth as he chews his lip, but whatever impulse he has he avoids it, settling instead for a quick touch of the hand to his cheek before he nods and gestures to the door on the other side.

Creeping forward beside Dean, Castiel ducks down to get a better look at the grace. On the ceiling above it, he can make out a wide circle, filled with sigils he hasn’t seen in millennia. Sigils no demon should know. He grasps Dean’s arm and points them out before rising slowly to his full height and looking down into the room below.

There, on the floor directly beneath the grace, an identical circle has been drawn. Sitting at its center, cross-legged as though in meditation, is Godric. An assortment of charred feathers spread out on the ground behind him, and in front is Min, kneeling with her head bowed. Between them, an angel sword lays.

“ _Darbs niis olani oai Belial--esiasch ol oiad eophan oiveae od oiadhomil lonshin ol oadriax,_ ” Godric says, voice heavy and guttural as he repeats it again and again.

Castiel’s eyes just about bug out of his head. He looks over at Dean, who regards him with confusion.

“What’s he saying?” he mouths, and Castiel leans in close to reply.

“Obey me, for I am Belial,” he whispers. “Brother of the Morning Star and the true heir to Heaven.”

When he moves back, Dean is staring at him.

“You’re telling me this guy is a fallen angel?”

Castiel nods.

“Belial, the worthless one,” Castiel replies in another whisper, looking back down at the ritual going on below. “He was the first to lie, and to manipulate, and to harm for sport. God cast him out shortly after he cast out Lucifer. He’s become so twisted, I didn’t recognize him.”

Now, though, he sees it.

The chasm where his grace once resided; the tattered remains of his flight wings, so scorched by Hellfire that they’re little more than nubs of bone protruding from his back. What he had thought were bloody horns upon his head, Castiel now sees are the stumps of his second set of wings--the talons at his heels are the third.

“I thought he was an unusual demon, but I never... I should have known he was a fallen Seraph,” Castiel says.

“Crap,” Dean says, heading quietly back to the stairwell where Sam has moved completely out of sight. “If he’s that kind of demon, Ruby’s knife isn’t gonna do squat. What about the other one?”

“She’s just a demon,” Castiel says, looking back down into the room. He finds the door Sam will come through before checking the opposite wall, where the door to the outside stands.

The plan he quickly formulates isn’t exactly perfect, and he knows he’ll have to deal with Dean’s ire for putting himself in danger regardless of how it goes, but it’s the best he’s got right now.

“Go help Sam,” he whispers, and stepping lightly, he moves as swiftly as he can around the metal walkway until he comes to the door. When he reaches it, he looks back to see Dean glaring daggers at him from the platform over the stairwell. He smiles ruefully back at him, reaches for the handle and opens it slowly before slamming it shut and stepping forward.

As expected, both demons look up immediately.

Min scrambles to her feet. Godric-- _Belial_ , he reminds himself--merely blinks at him.

“Hello, brother,” Castiel says, strangely amused by the slight widening of Belial’s eyes at Castiel’s recognition. “It’s been a while.”

“ _Brother_?” Min asks, glancing at Belial with an expression of mirth. “Looks like 4-01 has finally cracked.”

“He didn’t tell you?” Castiel asks, lifting his brow as he looks down at them. “Seems like pertinent information, considering the line of work he’s put you in.”

Min’s brow furrows as she lifts a hand, ready to throw him over the edge with a thought.

“He’s probably embarrassed,” Dean pipes up before she can, and they jerk their heads around to see him stepping through the door behind them, casually twirling an angel blade in his hands.

“Considering how he’s ‘the worthless one’ and all. Right, Cas?”

“Something like that,” Castiel agrees.

“What are they talking about?” Min asks, looking back at Belial, whose nostrils flare in anger.

“The grace does not think me worthless,” Belial spits up at him, raising his hands toward it. "See how it responds to me? It _knows_ me.”

"Seriously? This is the guy you've been following?" Dean asks, and Min falters.

"Godric?"

"It's almost time," he tells her. “My ascension is almost at hand. I will return to my rightful place in Heaven.”

Min stares at him in abject horror.

"You're insane," she says, taking a half-step away as though his delusion might be contagious.

"All this time I thought we were going to use the grace to rise to power in Hell, and you're-- you want to go to _Heaven_?"

“It is my right,” he says. “And I give that right to you, Min.”

She stares at him, an expression on her face like she might be sick.

“You think I want to rule Heaven with you?”

He seems to falter at that, his certainty shaken somewhat as he looks at her.

“You’ve been so loyal, Min. For centuries. I could not have chosen anyone better to rise at my side.”

“I would rather die in that bunker with 1-06 drooling at my feet than go to Heaven,” Min sneers, and Belial actually flinches. The callous jab at Zabo’s current state makes Castiel miss his grace more than ever. Smiting Min would be _very_ satisfying. Still, he’s happy to settle for what he can get.

“I know Zabo isn’t here,” he says, and Min looks up at the sound of his voice echoing into the room. “But would this bunker do?”

Min barely has a moment to react before Sam is right behind her, driving the demon blade through her chest in a clean, swift movement. Red light flickers around the wound before she crumples forward, blood oozing out onto the floor.

Belial looks down at her for the briefest of moments before lifting one hand, throwing Sam and Dean back out through the door into the stairwell with a thought. The door slams shut after him, and Belial looks up at Castiel.

“It is no matter,” he says, pushing Min’s body out of the circle and rearranging his feathers and sword before sitting once more, staring up into the swirling maelstrom of grace he's collected. "I will rise, and the angels will beg me to let them back into the garden."

There’s a _thump, thump, thump_ as one of the Winchesters--Sam, Castiel realizes as he sees Dean appear on the walkway nearby--slams himself against the locked door.

Belial pays it no mind; simply raising his hands toward the grace and starting his chant all over.

"You sorry son of a bitch," Dean says. "You really think stealing all this grace is gonna grant you a get out of jail free card?"

Belial doesn’t respond. His chanting grows louder, and above him, the grace rolls and swirls like a glowing stormcloud.

“ _Ol nazpsad dlvgar ollog mad nanaeel_ ,” he chants, and Castiel backs up a step. He looks over at Dean.

“Call Sam,” he says. “We have to get out of here.”

“What?” Dean says, wide-eyed as he glances back down to see the grace swirling faster. “Cas, we have to stop him, he’s about to--”

“Sam!” Castiel shouts over him, and Dean, startled, jumps into action. He runs back into the stairwell and calls Sam up. It’s only a couple of seconds until they’re both on the walkway.

Castiel shoves open the door, holding it wide until they’re out, and follows them outside.

“All that chanting, the ritual with the prayer and his old feathers and his sword--it’s all an effort to convince the grace not to turn on him,” Castiel says, moving briskly away from the bunker. “He’s deluded himself into thinking he’s worthy of grace, but he still knows the grace won’t agree.”

“So he’s going to explode?” Sam says, running beside him, and Castiel nods as the three of them simultaneously break into a sprint, heading for the buildings of Radio City.

“Wait,” Dean gasps out as they push onward. “You said if you tried to absorb it the blast could be huge, and I mean... you’re a hell of a lot more worthy than a demon. How bad is this gonna be?”

“The containment sigils should stop it from spreading too far,” Castiel hedges.

“But won’t the sigils break when the roof caves in?”

“If he’s created them properly--and I think he has, or the grace wouldn’t just float there like it is--they will have been worked into the fabric of space. Once cast, they don’t need a physical presence to hold.”

“Okay,” Dean says.

“It’s still going to cause the equivalent of a major earthquake in the area,” Castiel says. “We need to get the others out of the cells.”

They’re at the door when they hear it; a high-pitched whine and a roar like a dragon tearing through the sky. The ground starts shaking within seconds, sending cracks through the already broken asphalt. Castiel yanks open the door anyway, ignoring Dean when he shouts for him to stop.

“Break these sigils,” is all he says, running over the threshold and down the hall. The building rattles around him as he runs, chunks of brick falling all around him as the floor lurches and the lights flicker off.

He thinks he’s alone until the circle of flashlight appears on the still-shaking floor ahead, and he keeps running, skidding to a stop at the top of the stairs. He only pauses a moment before he descends.

Dust is thick on the lower level, clouds of it shaking loose from holes that open up in the walls and the ceiling, and he coughs, waving his hand in front of his face to clear it as the flashlight beam sweeps over the hallway.

“Anyone still down here?” Dean’s voice calls out from beside him, his hand settling on Castiel’s shoulder and squeezing. “Alice?”

There’s movement at the far end of the hall, and Castiel can just make out the shape of Zedekiel with the shotgun.

“2-05!” he shouts. “It’s us. Please, we have to move.”

She hesitates a moment, but when the floor gives another almighty lurch she comes to a decision.

“3-03, help me with 1-06,” she says, commanding. “Alice, Ray, can you walk on your own?”

Alice responds in the affirmative, along with the low voice that until now Castiel has known as Ikenna, and within a few seconds they’re all picking their way across the uneven floor.

Upstairs, they see the beam of Sam’s flashlight coming toward them down the hall, and Dean has to tell Zedekiel not to shoot.

“Hurry,” Sam shouts when he sees them. “One of the other buildings already collapsed.”

When they break out, staggering into the dim moonlight, they can hear the rumble and crash of another building trembling to the ground, and they move as swiftly as they can to an open stretch of ground. There, they wait, catching their breath.

It takes almost ten minutes for the aftershocks to stop.

Looking around at the faces of his brothers and sisters, at Sam and at Dean and the people they’ve saved, he can’t help the happy sob that spills from his lips. He’s free.


	38. Rough Seas

 

It takes three trips back and forth in the truck to get all the angels, along with Alice and Ray, to the house in Adak. Once they’re there, it’s well after midnight. Dean wishes that meant they could all just crash, but one pointed look from Sam as he ushers the last two angels into the house tells him that they still have work to do. He knows his brother is right. That doesn’t mean he’s looking forward to telling a group of scared, confused people that they’re actually angels.

In the end they decide that the best way to approach it is the same way they went about it with Adaeoet.

Dean prays from the driver’s seat of the car, Castiel sitting beside him, giving him the information he needs and fielding the text messages from Sam that let them know when each newly-informed angel has approached him.

Levanael is first, and it only takes around five minutes for Sam to give them the all clear. Glma is much the same, then Akriel. Odatt takes more convincing, and after around twenty minutes Castiel leaves Dean briefly to go inside and check on the situation. When he comes back, he tells Dean that when Odatt remembered, he also remembered Castiel when he’d taken on the Purgatory souls.

Apparently, in his fear of being killed for his refusal at the time to bow before Castiel, he had locked himself in a cupboard marked with protective sigils.

“Jesus, Cas,” Dean says, and Castiel looks at him with a guilty expression.

“I explained to him that I was incredibly sorry,” he says. “I don’t know whether he believed me or not, but when I reminded him that I’m human now it was enough to make him come back outside. He’s gone to bed, now. We can move on to the next one.”

Luckily, Aaira and Zedekiel take much the same amount of time as the first few. They decide,

after much discussion, to hold off on telling Zabo.

“One of the others will be able to heal her once their grace is restored,” Castiel says. “It’s probably best to wait until then. It would only cause her further alarm right now.”

“How long do you think it’ll be before they’re all powered up again?” Dean asks, and Castiel hums in thought.

“Perhaps four or five days,” he allows. “They all lost a lot of grace.”

It’s close to two o’clock in the morning by the time they’re all squared away in the assorted bunk beds, cots and doubles of the four-bedroom house. It’s a good thing the place is so damn big.

Dean collapses onto the couch.

“Is she doing okay?” he asks as Castiel walks back in from where he’s been helping Levanael convince Zabo to settle down beside her in the room with a double.

“It’s hard to say,” Castiel admits, sitting down beside him and leaning his head back to look at him. “She’s quietened, but she’s still clearly distressed. I think we made the right choice not telling her yet.”

“Yeah.”

“Where’s Sam?”

“Talking to Ray and Alice,” Dean says, nodding toward the kitchen.

“How are they?”

“Surprisingly good,” Dean says. “Ray was possessed for almost three years. Alice was about one and a half. They’re both pretty shaken up, but they’re walking and talking so I’m counting it as a win.”

Stretching his arm over the backrest, Dean looks over at him.

“How about you?” he asks, letting his fingers touch Castiel’s hair briefly before he drops his hand to his shoulder. “You doing okay?”

“I am,” Castiel says with a tired smile. “Very okay. Perhaps even fantastic.”

Dean grins.

“That’s what I like to hear.”

Yawning deeply, Dean watches Castiel settling further and further into the cushions of the couch. It’s only when he’s almost asleep that he realizes he never gave him his stuff.

With all the commotion of getting everyone else sorted out and settled, Castiel is still dressed in the thin pajamas he found him in.

“Crap,” he says, and Castiel blinks his eyes open, looking at him in alarm. “Just-- don’t go to sleep yet. Give me a second.”

Getting to his feet, Dean crosses the room to his bag and pulls it open, digging through until he finds the heavy plastic bag he’s searching for. When he turns back around, Castiel is watching him thoughtfully.

“So, uh,” Dean says, making his way back to the couch and putting the bag down on the coffee table. “I picked up some stuff for you, back in Anchorage. Figured you’d need some clothes and shoes and stuff.”

Smiling crookedly, Castiel pulls the bag forward. It rustles as he opens it, pulling out a pair of black boots to see the rest underneath.

“Thank you, Dean,” Castiel tells him.

“I didn’t know what you’d like, so I just... I don’t know, those colors looked right I guess,” Dean shrugs, rubbing at the back of his neck and hating how he can feel his cheeks growing warm.

“These all look exactly right,” Castiel says, spreading the navy blue checked shirt and black jacket over his knees and lifting up the dark jeans.

“We can, um... we can go get some more stuff when we get back,” he says, blushing harder when Castiel reaches the bottom of the bag where there’s a three-pack of dark blue boxer briefs. He runs his fingers over the soft fabric, and Dean swallows awkwardly, casting around for something to say. “Your phone’s in there, too. Found it in your car.”

Castiel digs around and finds it under some socks. As soon as he switches it on, it lights up, buzzing with about two dozen missed calls and messages. He grimaces and turns it back off.

“Well, it still works,” he says, sticking it back into the bag before pulling out a plain black t-shirt and some underwear and looking down at himself. “I should shower.”

“Yeah,” Dean nods, trying not to stare at the boxer briefs that he bought himself and _should_ be able to look at without turning beet red. “You can borrow some of my track pants if you want.”

He doesn’t wait for an answer before he heads back to his bag and pulls them out, turning as he stands to offer them. Castiel has already crossed the room. He takes the pants, clutching them to his chest with everything else, and kisses Dean, one hand cupped around his cheek.

He stands there for a moment after, eyes closed with their noses brushing.

“Thank you,” he repeats, and Dean exhales with a smile before he kisses him again.

“Anytime.”

In the morning, Dean wakes up on the couch, leaning against Castiel’s side. There’s a blanket draped over them that he doesn’t remember seeing, but he ignores it in favor of pressing his face into the hollow of Castiel’s neck and breathing him in. Castiel’s arms tighten around him.

“Good morning,” Castiel murmurs against the top of his head, breath tickling his hair.

“Go back to sleep,” Dean says, not bothering to open his eyes.

“It’s already noon, Dean,” Sam says from somewhere behind him, and he forces one eye open, stretching his neck to look over the back of the couch.

Sam is standing there, along with almost everyone else, and they’re all looking at Dean and Castiel with amusement. Dean fights off the impulse to pretend he’s not currently snuggling with the guy and sits up as casually as possible.

“There’s no flights out of here until Sunday,” he points out. “Who cares if it’s noon.”

“We’ve still got to make ID’s for everyone,” Sam says, gesturing toward the nine people standing around him. “Right now, only you, me and Cas have ID’s. They won’t let anyone else on the plane.”

Rubbing at his face with his hands, Dean sighs.

“Yeah, good point. They’re already going to be asking a whole lot of questions at the airport since nobody saw any of you get off a plane here.”

“I have an ID,” Alice pipes up, and they all turn to find her with her arms wrapped around her waist. “So does Ray.”

Digging into her pocket, she holds up an official-looking military ID with her picture on the front.

“We-- they all had these,” she says, shuffling a little with socked feet. “The people in town all think they were here officially, doing something with the old military buildings. They know my face, and they already buy the backstory.”

“So you’re thinking...” Sam trails off, at a loss, and Alice shrugs.

“How about, if they ask, we tell the people at the airport that we’ve been carrying out some kind of... I don’t know. A security test?” Ray suggests. “To find out how easy it is for people to sneak into the country via these islands?”

He scrunches up his nose.

“It’s sounding less plausible the more I say. And they’ll still need ID’s, anyway.”

“We’ve got a friend who can take care of that,” Dean says. “She can work her computer magic to buy book plane tickets while she’s at it.”

“Computer magic?” Ray asks.

“At this point I honestly don’t know if you’re being literal or not,” Alice says.

“I just mean she can move some money around,” Dean says. “Flights back to Anchorage are almost seven-hundred per person, so we’ll get her to do that thing where she puts it on the tab of some scumbag who got rich screwing people over.”

“So your friend is Robin Hood,” Ray says with an impressed nod. “Good to know.”

Within the hour Dean has convinced a very excited Charlie to fly out to meet them.

“Alright,” he says as he ends the call, dumping his cell on the table with a clatter. “She’ll be here on Sunday at five, and we’re gonna have to haul ass unless we want to be here another week, because our flight is at six.”

“At least that will give me time to work on a convincing impression of a--” Alice looks at the ID Sullivan had been using-- “Warrant Officer. Whatever the hell that is.”

Sam uses the digital SLR they picked up in Anchorage to take their pictures against an assortment of neutral colored walls in the house, using the tiny preview screen in place of looking through the broken viewfinder. Once he’s got a couple of decent shots of each of them, he heads for the community center--one of the only places on the island with WiFi--and emails them to Charlie.

 

By Saturday afternoon, some of the angels are going a little stir crazy. Being free but still unable to leave the house in case any of the locals start wondering who they are and how they got here is getting to them, and Dean offers to take them on a drive out to one of the lakes south of the town.

“What if someone sees you?” Alice asks without turning, still trying to hold perfectly still while Aaria braids her hair.

“The guy we rented the car from told us which lakes the locals fish at,” Dean says with a shrug. “I’ll just drive us to one of the other ones.”

Within half an hour, Glma, Zedekiel and Akriel are hiding in the back seat of the F-250, and Dean heads south. When they finally reach the lake he was aiming for, they all climb out and stare.

The water is clear and still, and a brief lull in the usually strong wind means that while it’s not exactly warm, it’s pleasant in the sporadic patches of sunlight.

The three angels take off immediately--Zedekiel and Glma side by side as they run toward the water, Akriel toward a patch of white and purple flowers. She crouches beside them, leaning down to inhale deeply. Dean puts on his sunglasses and heads for a patch of soft-looking grass near the lake’s edge and tries not to dwell on the fact that Castiel had decided not to come with them.

They’ve been there for about an hour when Glma comes to sit beside him, smiling at Dean before he looks down to the water’s edge, where Akriel and Zedekiel are picking through stones and tossing them out over the lake’s surface. It’s a surprisingly nice day, considering the heavy cloud overhead. Dean’s just contemplating that when Glma glances over at him and laughs.

“What?”

“Castiel is praying to me,” he says, leaning back on his elbows and directing his attention back on the angels by the water, like he thinks he can get away with any of that without adding some detail. Dean stares at him.

“And?” he asks after a long moment. “What is he saying?”

“That if you don’t check your phone and respond to the message he sent you in the next half an hour, he’s going to assume we’ve been attacked by a herd of rare carnivorous caribou and hunt us down.”

Dean grins, pushing himself to his feet and dusting off his jeans as he heads over to the car. He plucks his cell from its place in the center console, swipes his thumb over the screen, and almost chokes when he sees the message Castiel has sent him.

**Will we get a room to ourselves in Anchorage?**

He types out a hasty reply-- **Definitely!!** \-- and sends it before he can worry about how embarrassingly eager those exclamation marks made him seem. Really, though, what’s the point in playing it cool? Apparently Castiel has been able to feel him longing for him since forever, so if he doesn’t think that Dean is 100% down for whatever he’s putting on the table, he’s kidding himself.

The response he gets back a few seconds later still makes him blush.

**I’m looking forward to it.**

The rest of the afternoon goes quickly. Dean spends most of it sitting in the open door of the Ford, sending increasingly flirtatious messages to Castiel. He only stops when he finds himself getting a little too into it, and signs off with a simple, **We’re heading back in a minute** before putting the phone away and taking a brisk walk down to the water. With the return of the wind, it’s cold enough that he’s back in a decent state within a few minutes.

They spend another night on the couch, Sam stretched out on the recliner opposite, Glma on another, and the other assorted angels, Alice and Ray in the other rooms.

When Sunday finally arrives, the hours start to drag again. Dean looks at the time repeatedly, and when his short trip into town to pick up stuff to make sandwiches for lunch results in hearing that the fog today might be too bad for the plane he thinks he might actually scream.

By some miracle, though, it clears enough by the afternoon. Shortly before five o’clock, Charlie steps off the plane and runs to meet him.

“Your majest--” he starts, and she grabs hold of his arm as she rushes past.

“No time, no time,” she says dragging him with her outside until she realizes she isn’t sure where she’s going. Dean directs her toward the truck. Inside are four of the angels, all waiting calmly, and Alice, who looks nervous as hell about the fraud she’s about to commit.

“You good if I leave them with you to go pick everyone else up?”

“Go, go, go,” she waves frantically, and he knocks on the hood as he runs to the driver’s side door. The angels jump out as he climbs back in, and by the time he pulls away he can see Charlie handing out an assortment of IDs.

The others are waiting, and they all hurry out as soon as he pulls up outside the house. Ray and the remaining angels climb inside, while Sam and Castiel leap into the tray at the back--even though it’s got seating for six, there’s still not enough room inside the cab--and he floors it.

The clock on the dash says 5:16pm.

They make it back to the airport in four minutes, and Dean sprints around the side of the building, where Norm pointed out the key drop-off point on Thursday. He shoves the keys into the box, along with the keys to the house, and makes a mental note to call Kate and let her know. He doesn’t have time to feel bad about it.

By the time he reaches the check in counter, he’s wheezing. Charlie pats him on the back.

“So, um... I tried to shout out to you when you started running,” she says. “The plane’s been delayed an hour.”

Leaning with his hands on his knees, he looks up at her and laughs.

As expected, the airport staff appear more than a little confused about where all these people came from--and more so about why Charlie has landed and then abruptly turned around to leave--but despite all of Alice and Ray’s prepared backstory about national security operations they don’t ask any probing questions.

By half past seven, they’re all on board what Dean suspects is the fullest flight the tiny airport has seen in recent years, and the plane is taxiing to the runway.

Three and a half hours later, they land in Anchorage.

The motel they head toward is a half hour away from the airport, and Charlie uses a card of dubious origins to pay for five rooms.

“I’ll room with you, Samsquatch,” she says, hooking her elbow through Sam’s and shoving a room key into her pocket before holding the others out. “Choose wisely, my friends.”

Levanael and Odatt are the first to step forward, choosing a room on the ground floor and taking Zabo along with them. Her condition has improved considerably since her grace has started to replenish itself, but Levanael has insisted they wait until she is able to heal her completely before attempting to tell her who she is. Glma, Akriel and Zedekiel are next, taking the next room along from Sam and Charlie, and Aaira, Alice and Ray take the one directly upstairs.

Dean and Castiel, who have conspicuously said nothing throughout the whole affair, glance at one another.

Charlie holds out the last remaining key.

“Looks like you two are stuck with each other,” she says, barely holding back the teasing smile. “Imagine that.”

“Goodnight, Charlie,” Dean says brightly, taking the key in one hand and Castiel’s wrist in the other as he pulls him toward the stairs.

“Good _night_!” she sings back.

The room is basically their usual fare; bad lighting, pilled carpet, questionable choice in bedding and the kind of wall art that should have stayed in the thrift store bargain bin.

It’s also completely, wholly empty of anyone else.

It’s the best room Dean has ever seen.

As soon as they’re inside, he dumps the bag that holds his and Castiel’s things on the chair by the door and peels off his jacket.

“Finally,” he says, dropping it on top of the bag and turning around. “I never thought I’d be so psyched to be in a dumpy motel in Alaska.”

“It is nice to be off that island,” Castiel agrees, bending down to pull off his shoes.

He steps out of his boots, one dark sock bunched up a little where it’s started to fall down, and Dean can’t help but smile at the sight. It’s stupid, but that awkward looking sock makes his chest feel like it’s bursting, sending something warm and aching through all his limbs as he looks back up at Castiel’s face.

“Also,” Castiel says, stepping forward into Dean’s space. “It would appear that we have some time alone.”

Dean lifts his eyebrows, moving his hands to Castiel’s hips and tugging him forward a little.

“It seems that way,” he says.

Castiel’s eyes crinkle at the corner as he bites back a smile, and he moves closer still, leaning in, and-- yawns. Explosively. Right in Dean’s face.

Dean bursts out laughing.

“Sor--” Castiel yawns again, eyes squeezing closed with the force of it. “Sorry.”

Immediately, he tries to lean in again, and Dean pulls back after a brief peck.

“Cas,” he laughs.

“I’m not that tire--tired,” Castiel insists through another deep yawn. “We can--”

“We can hold off on the... on whatever you were planning for another night,” Dean tells him. “I promise, I’m not gonna change my mind before then. I’m still going to want you in the morning, believe me.”

“But we’ve already held off,” Castiel says stubbornly, trying again to lean in and huffing against Dean’s lips when he’s met with another light kiss. “We’ve held off forever.”

“You’re making it really hard for me to stick to my guns, here, Cas,” Dean grins.

“I can make it even harder,” Castiel tells him, a wicked tilt to his mouth that tells Dean he knows exactly what he just said.

“I don’t doubt that.”

“So just--”

Whatever he was about to say gets cut off with another yawn, which becomes a frustrated growl.

“Fine,” he groans, and drops his hands from Dean’s shoulders, skimming them over his chest in the process. Dean curses his sensitive nipples for the reaction the feeling sparks. “We’ll sleep.”

Watching him disappear into the bathroom, pulling off his shirt as he goes, Dean wonders why in the hell he picked tonight to be sensible.

 

Dean wakes at half past six in the morning, curled up on his side with Castiel flush against his back, one bare leg woven between his own. His forehead is pressed against the base of Dean’s neck, and he’s breathing steadily, and Dean is so happy he could cry.

It’s more than he ever dared to hope for, having Castiel here like this. Even just getting him to stick around seemed impossible for the longest time.

Reaching back, Dean seeks out the hand he can feel resting between them, and when he finds it he pulls softly until it hooks over his waist, spreading against his stomach.

“It’s early,” Castiel mumbles, pulling him closer, and Dean just hums in agreement, sliding his fingers between Castiel’s and pressing back against him.

He drifts back to sleep, and doesn’t wake again until almost eleven, when some obnoxious person--he’s betting Sam--decides to start knocking on their door. Prying his eyes open, he looks over at Castiel, now laying on his stomach and drooling on the pillow, and wriggles out from under his arm.

Scratching his stomach, he pads to the door in his boxers and t-shirt, and pulls it open. Charlie stands on the other side, holding a cardboard tray of coffee in front of her like a shield.

“Sorry, sorry, Sam made me come up because he’s a chickenshit, but I brought coffee don’t kill me.”

Dean squints at her and takes the coffee, and her shoulders relax a little.

“We were sleeping,” Dean says.

“Did I mention--” she hooks a thumb toward herself. “Messenger, reporting for duty. Don’t shoot.”

“What’s the message?” Castiel asks, suddenly wide awake now that the smell of coffee is wafting into the room, and Dean steps aside to let him at it. He plucks a cup from the tray eagerly, holding it between two hands and inhaling the steam before he sips. Dean watches him, smiling, and doesn’t stop until he notices Charlie grinning at him.

“Shut up, Charlie,” he says, though he can’t hold off the smile.

“Pssh, you’re both adorable,” she says, and Dean gestures for her to come into the room, stepping out of her way as he puts the coffee down and grabs a pair of jeans from his bag.

“Anyway-- the message. There’s actually a couple of them. Alice and Ray are both listed as missing people, so they’ve decided to stick together and go to the police with some story about a kidnapper deciding to let them go.”

“Good plan,” Dean says, pulling his jeans on and sitting down. Charlie nods, chin resting on her hand across the table.

“They’re gonna fly back to Reno together because it’s kind of halfway between their hometowns.”

“When are they going?” Castiel asks, sitting on the edge of the bed in his underwear, completely unselfconscious as he drinks his coffee.

“Taxi’ll pick them up in an hour,” Charlie says, reaching out for Dean’s coffee as he puts it down and stealing a sip. “About an hour after that, Zedekiel, Akriel and Glma are going. They’re on a flight to New Orleans. Glma’s vessel was apparently some kind of hermit who lived on a house boat alone. He says there’s plenty of room for all of them, and I mean, I’m not _saying_ anything but I’m just saying I’m pretty sure those three have plans, if you catch my drift.”

Castiel snorts into his coffee. Actually _snorts_. Dean turns to look at him.

“What?” Dean says, grinning. “Don’t tell me they’re already--”

“I once overheard a very detailed, possibly pornographic conversation between the three of them,” he admits, and Dean exchanges a look with Charlie. “They got _very_ descriptive about what kinds of physical stimulus they all enjoyed the most, so it really wouldn’t surprise me.”

“Hey, good for them,” Charlie grins. “Silver lining to this crapstorm.”

“What about everyone else?” Dean asks.

“Levanael and Odatt want to keep Zabo with them,” Charlie says, stretching her arms out in front of her. “Just until she’s come back to herself. They said they like it around here. Sam’s been on the phone with some guy... Thomas?”

“Hunter out on St Paul,” Dean says, and she nods.

“He knows someone who can put them up in a place nearby,” she says.

“So who’s left?” Dean wonders aloud. “Just Aaira, right?”

Charlie nods.

“She was asking if we knew a couple of other angels--one named Sabrathan, who didn’t ring any bells, and Adaeoet. Sam put her in touch with him. They were still talking when I came up here, but I’m pretty sure she’s going to head over to wherever he is. I’ll probably organize her flights when we go downstairs.”

“So everything’s already been worked out?” Dean asks. “We slept through the whole thing?”

“Yeah, you lazy jerks. You’re lucky I love you or I would have woken you up hours ago.”

“What about us?” Castiel asks, draining the last of his coffee. “Are we leaving today?”

“I’m going in about two hours,” Charlie says. “I’ve got a thing I need to get back to in Chicago. You three are stuck here another night.”

Castiel pouts. Dean doesn’t blame him.

“Your flight leaves tomorrow morning at five,” Charlie says with a sympathetic grimace. “So you’ll have to get up disgustingly early. But hey, it’s direct. That’s a plus.”

After an entire day of goodbyes, the last of which doesn’t come until they take Aaira to the airport at almost ten o’clock, Dean follows Sam and Castiel back to the room on the ground floor.

They’re sharing tonight. The disgustingly early wake up call is set for three in the morning, so there didn’t seem to be much point in paying for two rooms that nobody would be getting any real sleep in.

Still, Dean looks wistfully up the stairs as they pass them, cursing his past self for not taking advantage of the privacy he and Castiel had had last night.

In the room, the three of them move easily around one another as they all prepare for bed, and when Dean emerges from the bathroom Sam is already snoring. Castiel is sitting on the edge of the other bed, rolling his head from side to side. He looks up when Dean closes the bathroom door.

“Stiff neck?” Dean asks quietly, padding across the worn carpet and pulling back the covers on the other side.

“A little,” Castiel says, giving it one last stretch before he pulls up his legs and settles beside Dean. “I used to get an ache there when I was in Rexford. I’d forgotten what it was like.”

“Mm,” Dean replies, scooting a little closer. “Roll over.”

“Why?”

“Just do it, Cas.”

Frowning at him, Castiel does, and Dean slides his hands onto the back of his neck. Castiel hisses under his breath.

“Did you wash your hands in ice water?”

“Shh,” Dean murmurs, grinning as he pulls his hands back and rubs them quickly together. “Sorry.”

When he tries again, Castiel doesn’t say anything, and Dean takes it as a good sign. Carefully he rubs at the knots in his shoulders, pressing his thumbs against the top of his spine. Castiel’s skin is warm under his hands. After a while he leans forward to kiss it.

“Better?” he asks, and Castiel just hums, contented where he lays with his face smushed into the pillow. Dean kisses his shoulder once more, smoothing his hand down over the skin.

“Goodnight, Cas.”

Judging by the sound Castiel makes in return, he’s already asleep.


	39. Lebanon

 

The Impala is a sight for sore eyes, sitting in the long-term parking lot of the Kansas City airport in Missouri, and Dean runs his hand over her hood as he makes his way to the back to throw in their bags.

“Oh, I missed you,” he says aloud, and flips Sam off when he snorts out a laugh. “For that, you can take the back seat.”

“Yeah right,” Sam says, a smirk on his face. “You just want Cas up front so you can make kissy faces and--oof!”

The duffel bag hits him square in the chest.

“Yeah, okay, I probably deserved that.”

In what he probably thinks is a display of good-natured acceptance, Sam spent the entire flight back from Anchorage being every bit the annoying brat he’s ever been when Dean has been involved with a girl. It’s infuriating. Dean is, in some twisted way, thrilled that he’s not treating him any different.

On the other hand, it’s driving him crazy.

“You’re lucky I don’t make you walk home.”

Sam rolls his eyes, ready to reply with what Dean is sure will be another top-shelf joke, when the sound of Cas approaching makes them both turn to look at him. When he meets Dean’s eye over the three cups of coffee he’d insisted on stopping to buy for them all as they walked through the terminal, he smiles. Dean feels a little like he’s going to burst at the sight.

Castiel hands off a regular black coffee to Sam before moving to give Dean his. He hesitates, chewing his lip.

“They had salted caramel mocha,” he says, lifting the tall cup in his left hand, whipped cream oozing out through the hole in the lid. “And I know you say you don’t like ‘frouffy’ coffee, but do you like salted caramel pie, so it seemed like... But...” he trails off, looking at the cup with a wrinkle in his brow. “It was probably presumptuous of me. I can go back, I’ll--”

Before he can get any further Dean takes both coffees, puts them on the roof of the Impala, and cups Castiel’s face in his hands to kiss him soundly.

Distantly, he’s aware of Sam letting out a shocked bark of laughter, and briefly lifts one hand to flip him off before wrapping it around Castiel’s waist and tugging him a little closer. It’s been almost twelve hours since their stolen kiss on their way out of the motel in Anchorage, and now that he has the chance to do it Dean doesn’t hesitate in biting down on his lower lip, giving it a gentle suck that makes Castiel sigh. He tastes of the Starburst candies they’d all been eating on the plane, sweet and tangy, and Dean resolves to kiss him again after he’s tasted the coffee that he knows he’s going to love. He’s ordered it in secret for himself at least a dozen times.

“Thanks, Cas,” he says when he pulls away.

Castiel is staring at him like he’s lost his mind, and... Dean can kind of see why. While he definitely hasn’t refrained from physical contact since they left the island, all their kissing has, thus far, been behind closed doors.

That he just kissed him like that in a public place, in full view of Sam and-- yep, he thinks as he looks over Castiel’s shoulder at a scandalized-looking woman in a velour tracksuit and her assorted family, that’s at least six citizens of the Midwest--is more than a little noteworthy.

But he figures, fuck it.

They’ve saved the world more times than he cares to count, and he’s finally got something good going for him. So if he wants to drink the frouffy coffee or listen to a Top 40 station every now and then, or yeah, kiss the love of his life in a public place, he’s going to damn well do it.

“You’re welcome,” Castiel replies, looking a little dazed, and Dean leans back in to deliver one more kiss, short and sweet, before plucking the coffee from the roof and handing Castiel’s back over.

Picking up the last couple of bags from the ground behind the car, Sam shoves them into the trunk and slams it shut before looking at Cas with a grin.

“Dude,” he says, opening the back door and leaning over the roof. “Do us all a favor and don’t ever bring him pie in public.”

Castiel frowns for a moment before he parses Sam’s meaning, and promptly turns beet red.

“Long walk back to Lebanon,” Dean muses as he climbs inside, and Sam just laughs harder.

Two hours into the four hour drive, Castiel falls asleep in the passenger seat with his chin on his shoulder and his mouth half open. Dean keeps sneaking glances.

“Eyes on the road,” Sam says, but he’s smiling when Dean meets his eyes in the mirror. “You sure you don’t want me to drive?”

“I’m good,” Dean tells him. “You get your beauty rest.”

Castiel wakes a half hour before they arrive, snuffling into awareness as Dean reaches over to grab a new cassette from the box on the floor.

“Sorry,” Dean murmurs. “Didn’t mean to wake you.”

“It’s alright,” Castiel tells him. “It’s a nice way to wake up.”

The words makes Dean’s heart swell, and he nods, a feeling like his voice might crack if he tries to answer out loud. He leaves the cassette tape where it is, instead resting his hand on the seat between them. Castiel’s fingers weave through his within moments.

“We’re nearly there,” he says.

“Good,” Castiel sighs, leaning his head back against the window and looking over at Dean as he runs his thumb over the side of Dean’s hand.

“You hungry? I think there’s some steak in the freezer.”

“That sounds nice,” Castiel says, and the rest of the drive is quiet, save for Sam’s snores in the back seat.

It’s nearing nine o’clock when they turn into the bunker’s street, the sunset casting golden light over the unfinished road. The door to the garage is in shadow, dingy and gray and marked with old graffiti. As they come to a stop, he feels a wave of apprehension and looks over at Castiel.

“You sure you want to stay here?” he asks, and regrets his phrasing immediately when Castiel looks at him with hurt and confusion all over his face. “Shit-- I just-- I mean because it’s... You’ve been trapped in a basement for months and we’ve brought you back to another hole in the ground.”

“Dean, this isn’t a hole in the ground,” Castiel says. “It’s home.”

“It is?”

“I’d certainly like it to be.”

“You’re both disgusting,” Sam says blearily from the back seat.

“Bite me, Sam,” Dean says, still staring at Castiel. “We’re having a moment.”

With a laugh, Sam pushes open his door, climbing out to open the garage. Dean reaches over and taps Castiel’s hand.

“So I know we didn’t talk about it yet,” he says, “but... your room is still set up from before. So we can get you settled in there, or, um. You can stay with me. Or there’s a couple of bigger rooms further down, so we could, I don’t know, start fresh in one of those? Set up our room together? But if that’s too... if it’s going to be better for you to have your own space for a while, or even always if you want it, then that’s perfectly fine. But if you want to move into my room that’s awesome too. Or--” he stops talking abruptly, pushing out a breath, and looks over at Castiel. “Fair warning, I’m probably gonna keep rambling until you say something.”

“What was the third option?”

“Set up a new room together,” Dean says, trying not to get his hopes up.

“And it would be our room?”

“Yeah.”

Castiel smiles at him, his hand moving to Dean’s knee and squeezing.

“I’d like that.”

The sound of Sam clearing his throat outside cuts through the moment before they can lean in, and Dean thumps his head back against the seat with a groan as he looks out the window. Sam meets his eyes with an apologetic expression until he opens the door.

“The trunk is still locked,” he explains, rubbing at the back of his neck. “Sorry.”

Dean glances over at Castiel, who is staring at his lap and biting his lips in an effort not to smile, and shoves lightly at his shoulder.

“C’mon,” he says, and climbs out of the car. “Let’s get unpacked and I’ll start on dinner.”

It’s been about two months since anyone was at the bunker, and when they finally head in from the garage it’s musty and cold.

They head for their rooms first; Sam veering off to his own near the library while Castiel trails Dean down to room 11, like it’s just understood that he’ll be sharing it with Dean until they have time to sort out their new one.

It’s a mess when Dean opens the door, with the blankets bunched up at the foot of the bed and his dead-guy robe tossed carelessly on the floor. Piles of books and papers are spread all over, post-its with little notes like FIND STRONGER SUMMONING SPELL and MAYBE TRY PSYCHIC?? scrawled across them in his messy hand.

There are a few too many empty bottles on the side table. Dean scratches uncomfortably at the back of his neck.

“Sorry it’s kind of a mess.”

The sound of Castiel dumping his duffel on the floor comes a moment before his arms snake around Dean’s waist, and he feels the low-burning warmth in his stomach at the sensation of a soft kiss on his shoulder.

“I’ll clean up in here,” Castiel tells him. “Go find those steaks.”

“You sure?”

Castiel’s stomach rumbles as if on cue; Dean feels it where he’s pressed up against his back.

“I’ll take that as a yes,” he laughs, twisting to look at him over his shoulder, and Castiel smiles back at him. “There’s, um... if you want to put your stuff away, you can empty out the bottom drawer. It’s just sheets and towels in there.”

“Alright,” Castiel says.

“Alright.”

Leaving him to it, Dean heads for the kitchen and immediately steps back out.

Whoever last opened the freezer before they left didn’t quite close the door, and while it’s chilly in the bunker, it hasn’t been quite enough to save the steak or the frozen pizza that has all but grown legs. When Sam wanders in a moment later, already dressed in his track pants, he swears it wasn’t him, but Dean’s sure as hell not the one responsible for the popsicle stick that’s been left on the sink, so he’s got his suspicions.

“I’ll make you a deal,” Dean says in the hallway, fanning his arm in front of his face to make the smell go away. “You drive over to Smith Center and pick up some food and stuff, and I’ll deal with the slime monster.”

“There’s a slime monster?” Castiel asks as he appears in the hallway behind them, his arms loaded down with old sheets and a bag of what Dean guesses is their combined laundry.

“Where?”

“In the fridge,” Sam says.

“Someone left it open,” Dean explains, and Sam frowns at him. “And now the food is evil.”

The concerned expression on Castiel’s face fades, only to be replaced with what is somehow the best impression of a hungry and heartbroken four-year-old that Dean has ever seen, despite Castiel being an ancient angel in the body of a guy who’s pushing forty.

“No steak?” Castiel asks. Dean looks pointedly at Sam until he finally caves.

“Fine,” Sam says, throwing his hands up. “I’ll go. Give me the keys.”

By the time Sam heads back to his room to get changed again, Castiel has disappeared into the laundry room, and Dean’s already emptied everything into a garbage bag. He sprays the fridge out with disinfectant, gives it a thorough scrub, and is done before Sam shouts out, “Back soon!”

The garage door slams, and with the kitchen smelling citrus-fresh and his own hands scrubbed clean, Dean goes looking for Castiel. He can hear him from the hallway, shuffling things around in his--their--room and humming what sounds suspiciously like Fire and Rain.

He pauses when he reaches the door, suddenly nervous. It’s not until he wonders why that he realizes that they’re truly alone. He’s still standing outside, calculating how long Sam is likely to be gone when Castiel turns from where he’s just finished putting his last shirt into the drawer and sees him.

He jumps, a startled yelp echoing around the room, and Dean can’t help but grin as he steps inside.

“You surprised me,” Castiel says, shoulders slumping a little, and Dean laughs as he comes to a stop in front of him, tugging him in by his belt loops.

“That’s what they call karma.”

He kisses Castiel softly at first, thumbs skating over his sides until he feels a quiet moan form against his lips and lets them open, Castiel’s tongue darting out to meet his.

“Sam’s gone to Smith Center,” he says in between kisses, moving from his lips to press his own over his cheeks and up to his ear. “So it looks like we’ve got some privacy again.”

“Are you saying you’re done waiting?” Castiel asks him, pulling back to meet his eyes, and Dean nods.

“If you--”

He doesn’t finish. Castiel is kissing him hard, bruising, and before Dean knows what is happening they’ve fallen to his bed. The memory foam is soft and welcoming against his back. Castiel presses down on him from above, moving as if on instinct as he seems to kiss with his whole body, straddling Dean’s hips and shifting against him.

Arching up beneath him, Dean slides his hand up and over his thigh and feels the shape of Castiel’s cock hardening beneath his hand. Trailing his fingertips lightly over it again, he revels in Castiel’s soft _oh_ and wonders why he isn’t remotely nervous. He expected to be nervous.

An entire lifetime of gritting his teeth and avoiding his interest in men had convinced him that he’d be a wreck should this moment ever present itself. Somehow, it’s barely a blip on his radar. Feeling hard angles instead of soft curves, feeling the rasp of stubble catching when they kiss, feeling wide palms where he’s used to hands more delicate; none of it makes him stumble or falter or wonder what to do. Instead he feels intoxicated by every sensation, a trembling, pulsing heat building with every shift of Castiel’s body against his own.

He expected to be too scared to really enjoy himself. As it is, Dean thinks he might have to redefine his concept of heaven.

The only thing that’s making him a little unsteady is that this isn’t just someone to cling to for one night before leaving town. It’s someone who matters. Someone who he’d lay his life down to protect, who has done the same for him, time and again.

Realistically, he knows that Castiel’s range of experience in this arena is practically non-existent, and as a result he’s probably got no expectations at all, but the thought of messing up is terrifying, and Dean, for all his outward disapproval of all things sappy or romantic, wants the first time they sleep together to be perfect.

The unlikelihood of things working out that way makes it a little easier to push past the fear, and he deepens their kiss as he rocks forward again, feeling the heat of Castiel’s cock thickening against his thigh. Even through two layers of jeans he feels amazing, and Dean’s mouth falls open against Castiel’s cheek.

Slipping his hands up and under the back of his shirt, Dean scratches lightly, drawing another wordless sound of approval from him.

“You want to take this off?” he asks, breathless, and Castiel nods even as he moves back in for another kiss, apparently insatiable. Dean takes his time to work the buttons open with fevered hands. It’s another five kisses before they break apart long enough for him to push the shirt off Castiel’s shoulders; another three before it’s pulled free completely and thrown across the room, knocking something off the desk with a clatter.

Dean’s own t-shirt soon follows, and he pulls Castiel down, maneuvering him until he’s on his back and Dean can crawl over him. Sitting with his knees on either side of his hips, Castiel’s head propped up on the pillow, Dean reaches out to trail his hand down over his chest, letting his thumb catch on a nipple, fingers light and teasing over his ribs and stomach. He catalogues every gasped breath, every bitten lip, every dazed blink, committing all the best responses to memory so he knows for next time.

Hunting might be his life’s work, but he thinks he really should have something to fall back on.

Making Castiel feel good seems to be a pretty good choice right now.

He leans down as his hand reaches the fine hairs beneath Castiel’s navel, kissing his gasping mouth as he skirts the edge of his waistband.

“Can I--”

“Please,” Castiel says.

Carefully, Dean works his fly open, grazing his teeth over warm skin of Castiel’s collarbone when he finally slips his hand inside, skimming over the edge of what his memory helpfully supplies are navy-blue boxer briefs Dean bought for him in Anchorage. When his fingertips find the hard ridge of Castiel’s cockhead, warm and wet with pre-come and straining up toward the waistband, Castiel bucks up under his touch.

Dean breathes out a quiet, “Holy _fuck_ , Cas,” and slides his fingers over it again, his own cock pulsing hard at the feel of Castiel’s arousal.

“Dean,” he gasps, hips shifting restlessly as he tries to sit up. “Dean. Can I-- let me--”

Moving back, Dean watches as Castiel grabs hold of his jeans and drags them down with his underwear, wriggling his legs free in a way that can only be described as awkward before reaching out and dragging Dean back in, kissing him fiercely as he reaches down with two hands to tug and pull at Dean’s fly. In one swift, impossible movement, he flips them back over, and Dean’s jeans are gone. If he didn’t know any better, he’d think Castiel had used angelic mojo to magic them away. Considering the fact that he’s human now, Dean chalks it up to beginner’s luck.

Before he can give it any more thought Castiel is pressing against him and sighing, the warm, slick feel of their cocks sliding together enough to make him slow his movements for a moment. Dean pushes himself to sitting and works his hand between them, looking down to see them side by side.

There’s a near constant stream of pre-come running from Castiel’s cock, making the pink head glisten, and Dean stares down at it as it slides through his hand.

“So good,” he hears himself saying as he swipes his thumb over the head. “So fucking good, Cas.”

Castiel just moans, long and loud, a sound Dean can hardly believe came out of his mouth, and Dean squeezes him a little tighter before letting go and pushing at his shoulder, coaxing him to lay on his back.

There’s a tattoo on Castiel’s side, just over his hip, and when Dean traces over it with featherlight fingertips Castiel gasps and squirms, his stomach muscles tensing. Dean kisses the sensitive skin more firmly before sucking at it, laving at it with his tongue as he wraps his hand back around his cock and squeezes.

He stays there for a while, kissing and licking, biting and sucking, working his way ever lower until he’s nuzzling at his thighs. He can feel the heat of Castiel’s cock radiating off his skin, can smell the salt of him. Looking up, he sees Castiel watching him with lidded eyes, his mouth hanging slightly open, and he doesn’t waste any more time.

With more confidence than he thought he had, he leans forward and closes his lips over the head of Castiel’s cock.

Above him, Castiel moans, louder than before, and Dean releases him with a wet pop, dropping down to lick a stripe along its length before taking it back into his mouth. He flicks the tip of his tongue against the slit, tasting the bitter-sweet tang of his arousal before sinking a little lower and sucking. Repeating the motion again and again, he holds him steady with a hand on one hip while the other works around the base of his cock, thumb rubbing soft against a vein along the side.

He doesn’t relent until Castiel is whimpering, his entire body a taut string ready to snap, and he pulls back a little to look at him. He’s flushed all over, chest wet with perspiration, his eyes dark and hooded as he stares down at Dean like he’s having some kind of revelation. Reaching down, he pushes Dean’s hair back from his forehead, and it’s enough to make Dean want to taste him all over again.

He works him back into his mouth, sucking harder than before, moaning at the taste of him as he feels him swell even more against his tongue. Without any conscious thought, he takes him a little deeper, and the hand he’d been using to stroke him slides lower, dipping between Castiel’s thighs and back to skim over his rim.

Castiel’s hand tightens in his hair, his body tensing, and Dean pulls back a little.

“You like that?” he asks, voice rough. “You like when I touch you there?”

“Please,” Castiel breathes, nodding. “Do it again.”

He does, pressing a little more firmly but not dipping inside, just teasing over the puckered skin enough to make him squirm.

“Next time,” he murmurs against Castiel’s skin as he drags the finger back and forth, and slips his mouth over his cock again.

“Why not this time?” Castiel asks him, pushing up onto his elbows, his eyes bugging out a little when the movement results in more pressure. “Not that-- if you don’t want to--”

His eagerness has Dean’s cock throbbing, a bead of pre-come pulsing out and running down onto his thigh. He moans at the sensation, lips still sealed around Castiel’s cock, and his hand is in his hair again, tugging.

“Dean,” he moans. “Dean, I think--”

Dean sucks harder, presses his fingertip more firmly against his rim, and Castiel’s back arches up, his whole body locking as he comes. Dean works him through it, thrilling at the way he can feel his rim pulsing with every surge and swallowing it down until Castiel sinks, boneless, against the mattress.

Dean gives his cock one last lick, and crawls up over him. Castiel grasps him by the hair as soon as he’s close enough and kisses him hard enough to bruise, sucking the breath from his lungs as he wraps his thighs around Dean’s waist and rocks up against him, the pressure on Dean’s cock an exquisite kind of torture.

“Fuck, Cas,” Dean breathes out, rolling his hips slowly.

He rocks forward, sliding smoothly between Castiel’s thighs where they’re damp with sweat and arousal, and when the head of his cock catches against Castiel’s perineum it draws a sound from him that Dean wants to hear at least another dozen times before the night is over.

“Is it next time yet?” Castiel asks, and Dean gasps as another slow grind has his cock throbbing with need. “I will gladly count this as next time.”

“You sure?” Dean asks him, and he nods.

Leaning back down, Dean kisses him as he reaches blindly toward the bedside table, fumbling for the drawer and hoping that his supply of lube didn’t spontaneously dry out while he was away.

When his hand closes around the bottle he sends out a quiet thank you to the universe and flips open the cap.

Shifting back to his knees, he slides one hand from Castiel’s ankle to his thigh, moving him until his feet are flat against the bed so he can work him open. The lube is cold when he pours it into his hand, and he warms it for a moment, dropping a kiss to Castiel’s thigh before he slips his wet fingers into the crease of his ass, sliding them over his rim. He moves slowly, pressing a little harder on every pass, until finally one finger dips inside. He circles it, pushing a little deeper before slowly dragging it back out, and Castiel groans, tilting his head back against the pillow.

One by one, he works his fingers inside, stroking his inner walls and stretching him, slicking him up with as much lube as he can manage until three fingers are gliding in and out smoothly.

Against his thigh, Castiel’s cock is making a valiant effort at filling again, and Dean watches it twitch as he curls his middle finger to press against what Castiel’s loud reaction tells him is probably his prostate.

“Dean, please,” Castiel says, grinding helplessly back against Dean’s fingers as they continue to thrust into him. “It’s enough.”

He strokes over his prostate once more and pulls his fingers free, wiping them off on the sheets before he slicks himself up. Shuffling forward on his knees, he holds his cock against Castiel’s rim, dragging it up and down a couple of times, just to tease. Castiel sucks in a trembling breath.

Dean exhales and sinks inside.

He’s impossibly warm, so tight that Dean can hardly hold himself together, and he inches forward little by little until Castiel suddenly arches his back up off the bed, one leg kicking out. Somehow the movement pulls him deeper, and they cry out in tandem as Dean falls forward, his pelvis flush with Castiel’s thighs.

“Dean--” Castiel starts, breath catching when Dean rocks back a little. “This-- it feels…”

“You okay?”

“I’m okay,” Castiel says, breathing shakily. “But you’ll be embarrassed.”

“Cas, I’m inside you right now,” Dean says, a little incredulous even as he thrills at the thought. “I think we’re kind of past that point.”

Castiel studies him for a moment, thoughtful and serious as though they’re just sitting across a table right now. As though Dean didn’t just suck him off half an hour ago.

“I feel like I’ve been making love with you for years,” he says eventually, and Dean feels that warm, spreading happiness rolling out from his chest to all his limbs all over again. But he can’t hold his gaze. He looks at the rumpled blankets beside him instead.

“Is that what we’re doing?”

“I hope so.”

Dean pulls his lip between his teeth and takes an unsteady breath.

“I knew you’d be embarrassed,” Castiel says, one hand working between them to glide up over Dean’s chest, fingers soft.

“I know what you mean, though,” he adds after a moment, his hand tracing idly up and down the skin of his chest, tickling soft. “It’s… comfortable. Or, y’know. It was. Until you made me start thinking about it.”

“In that case, I suppose I should make you stop thinking,” Castiel says.

Dean is about to respond when Castiel succeeds, lifting his hips and shifting in such a way that Dean feels his cock throb hard as though suddenly a half second from coming. He grasps at the blankets, eyes wide, and struggles to keep his knees under him as he slowly pulls back just to slam back in.

Castiel’s hair is matted to his forehead with sweat, his mouth hanging open as he gasps for breath. Lifting one shaking hand, Dean cups his jaw, brushing his thumb down over Castiel’s lower lip. His mouth falls further open, and he reaches up to slide his palm around the back of Dean’s neck to drag him down into a kiss, the shift of their bodies sending another wave of pleasure through Dean. Pressed deep inside Castiel, he feels his cock pulse hard. Instead of a kiss, he finds himself simply breathing against Castiel’s open mouth.

“Cas,” he rasps out, voice utterly wrecked. “Cas, are you-- is this--”

“Feels good,” Castiel assures him, his fingers scratching at the back of Dean’s neck as the other hand trails down over his side and back to grip his ass, pulling him forward as Castiel rocks down. “ _Ahh_ \-- feels _very_ good.”

It’s all the confirmation he needs, and as he slowly rocks back he licks into Castiel’s mouth, kissing him filthy deep before closing his teeth around his lip and _tugging_ , hard. At Castiel’s broken whimper he slams back inside and repeats the motion; a slow drag out and a hard thrust in, setting a rhythm for himself that he doesn’t think he’s going to be able to maintain. He just feels too good. Too wet, too warm, and as Dean fucks into him he feels the way Castiel’s body seems to pull him greedily deeper.

He moans again, open mouthed against Castiel’s jaw as he pistons his hips a little faster.

Overhead, he’s vaguely aware of something rattling on the shelf over his bed with every hard thrust in, but the only sounds he’s really paying attention to are the ones Castiel is making. The breathless moans of Dean’s name, the trembling cries, the filthy-slick slap of their skin.

Pushing back up, he runs his hands along the back of Castiel’s thighs from ass to knee before pushing them toward his chest, and Castiel catches hold of them, angling his body so perfectly that Dean can hardly see straight.

As he increases his pace he looks down to the place where they’re joined, fascinated by the sight of his cock, flushed pink and shiny as it slides smoothly into him. Castiel’s own erection has returned in full force. Dean watches it steadily dripping onto his hip, pulsing with almost every push. He can’t drag his eyes away, and as he feels himself getting closer, closer, he takes it in his hand and strokes in time, squeezing the base and rubbing over the ridged head with his thumb.

He works his hand furiously, stroking Castiel until he’s writhing, and with a full-body quake he cries out, a stream of come surging out over Dean’s fingers to land on his chest. The sudden increase of pressure on Dean’s cock has him right on the edge, and he slams in again, again, again until finally he’s coming, filling Castiel as his body squeezes him. His toes curl in the blankets, and as he slowly pulls out, holding Castiel’s thigh up by his shoulder, he turns his head to kiss his knee.

He might be utterly spent, but he can’t keep his lips off him. Crawling up beside him, Dean pulls at his hip until he turns, and links their legs together, one hand spread over his chest as he presses kiss after breathless kiss against his lips.

“Dean?” Castiel murmurs after a few minutes, and Dean nuzzles into his chest, drawing patterns on his hip with his fingertips.

“Hmm?”

“Just... out of interest. What time was it when you came in here?”

Scrunching up his nose, Dean leans back to look at him.

“I don’t know,” Dean says. “Around ten?”

“And how far is Smith Center?”

“Why, you worried Sam’s gonna get back and walk i--” Dean cuts himself off when he notices Castiel pursing his lips in an effort not to laugh, and he turns to follow his line of sight to the clock. His eyes widen. “Holy _shit_. We’ve-- how the fuck is it 2am?”

He looks back at Castiel in utter bewilderment.

“Do you think he heard?” Castiel asks, a strange mix of embarrassment and amusement on his face, and Dean groans as he leans his head forward to rest against his chest.

“We weren’t exactly quiet,” Dean says, fighting off his own grin. “Poor kid’s probably traumatized.”

Castiel bursts out laughing.

Stepping out into the hallway, Dean wraps his robe more tightly around his waist and listens for any sound of movement before nods back at Castiel and pads toward the bathroom.

The bunker is quiet--unsurprising considering how long they’ve apparently been holed up in Dean’s room--and they spend another twenty-five minutes in the shower, lathering soap over each other’s bodies and kissing under the stellar water pressure until Dean finds himself in need of relief.

He looks down at his thickening cock in disbelief.

“How in the fuck do I have anything left?” he wonders aloud, and Castiel hums in some vague non-response before he wraps a soapy hand around him and strokes from root to tip.

Leaning forward, Dean rests his forehead against Castiel’s to watch as his cock head slides out from between his fingers. He doesn’t realize how heavily he’s leaning until Castiel takes a half step back and lets go, and he stumbles a little, catching himself on the wall just in time to realize what’s happening.

Kneeling on the wet tile, water running down his chest in rivulets, Castiel looks up at him as he strokes him once more.

“It looked like you enjoyed doing this,” he says, blinking up at Dean, and the next second he’s sucking him into his mouth.

He applies the same level of intensity and focus to sucking Dean’s cock that he does to going into battle. When he slides his palms up the back of Dean’s thighs, gripping his ass and encouraging him to slide forward, deeper into Castiel’s mouth, Dean has to lean harder against the wall to keep from falling over.

He keeps him there for what feels like forever, teetering on the edge, and Dean reaches back to one of his hands, guiding it along the crease of his ass.

Castiel pulls off, his mouth stretched and pink as he blinks up at Dean.

“You want--”

“I want your fingers,” Dean manages to stutter out. “Like I did for you. If you want to-- _ahh_!”

Castiel doesn’t waste any time, pressing his thumb firmly against Dean’s rim as he angles his

other fingers forward to tease at his perineum, and Dean has barely processed the sensation when his cock is enveloped again in wet heat.

Soon, there are two fingers thrusting lazily into him, catching over his prostate, and Castiel looks up at him as he gives one more long suck, simultaneously pushing his fingers deep and holding them against that spot. Dean couldn’t pull out if he tried. Castiel doesn’t seem to want him to.

He spills into his mouth with a wordless cry, fingers curling against the wall tile, and Castiel keeps pressing relentlessly until he’s finally empty and barely able to stand. His legs feel like jelly.

Castiel sends him back to his room after they’re dried off and dressed, a satisfied little smile on his face that has Dean’s stomach flipping wildly.

He uses the few minutes it takes for Castiel to join him to peel off the ruined blanket and dig a new one out of the closet. When he hears his door creak open, he turns to find him carrying a pizza box, two glasses of water balanced on top. He pushes the door shut with his hip. Dean chews his lip, bizarrely shy.

“Hey,” he says. Castiel smiles back at him, putting the box down on the desk before he slides a piece of paper out from beneath the glasses and hands it over. “Oh shit, what’s this?”

Castiel doesn’t answer him, instead he takes a large sip of water as he leans back against the desk. Dean reads.

 _ **Pizza’s keeping warm in the oven**_ has been printed in blue and then scratched out with a black pen, and underneath the black pen continues. _**Pizza’s in the fridge. Also I’ve booked you guys a vacation this week because there are not headphones strong enough to block the sounds I heard tonight. I love you both but Jesus Christ. Have fun in Florida.**_

Underneath the note, Sam has written down the address of some place on the coast. Dean snorts out a laugh, despite feeling his cheeks burn red, and tosses the paper onto his desk.

“Well,” he says, stepping into Castiel’s space where he’s still leaning on the desk and winding his arms around his waist. “That worked out.”

Castiel raises his brow.

“He _heard_ us,” he says, as if Dean missed the memo.

“And we scored a trip to the beach,” Dean says. “A whole week. _Alone_.”

Castiel’s smile spreads slow.

“That’s a lot of next times,” he says, tugging Dean closer, and Dean hums in agreement against his lips.

“We’ve got a lifetime of those.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading! I know it's risky to post a fic with a prologue from the perspective of an antagonist, so I really appreciate you reading the rest <3
> 
> I hope you all enjoyed my third entry into the DCBB; now it's time to start thinking about next year's plot...
> 
> ALSO! I couldn't very well set up the trip to Florida that Sam organized for them without including it somehow, so keep an eye out for the epilogue...


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